About:
My Name is Michael Aitken. b.1951. I was born in Bloxwich, Walsall. I went to Walsall Art school in Goodall Street for a year. I now live in Limehouse, East London, UK. In 2001 I was awarded a Millennium Lifetime fellowship award for my art project, "Charlie Brown and Chinatown".
I create paintings in oil, of a social nature usually; abstraction; landscape; and figurative work. I have no signature art style because there is so much to love about art.
The image above is made of fuchsia flowers fallen from the plant collected and on stuck onto paper.
Blog
Idea store's Poetry Night, Bethnal Green library;
3rd July, 2025
This is the poem that I read out at The Idea Store's Poetry Night.
The Girl on the Green Hill
Green, the colour green, the green of vegetation, the green of the grass. This colour reminds me of a strange, semi mystical vision. A mystery that, if I sit quietly, I can conjure up, like stage scenery, revealed by the drawing of a blue velvet curtain, drawn back in a dramatic silence as the audience of one, myself, seated in the theatre of the memory stares at in amazed wonder.
I was in the South of France, 1975, grape picking. I’d spend all day, sunrise to sunset, walking down one row of grape vines and back down another, filling large plastic baskets with the black bunches of Beaujolais grapes. They had to be picked at a certain time of year which was the job of the farmer to decide upon with absolute precision. Too early and they would not be ripe, too late and they would be damaged by the arrival of winter. I had finished for the day. It was twilight, a deepening, darkening sky began to fill the valleys, dark and sweet like the evening. I had eaten in the farm house at the long table that the farm hands sat around, the farmer’s wife went round the table dishing out the food, reaching over the shoulder and emptying the big ladle of stew onto each ones each plate. Large bowls of greens drenched in oil sat up and down the hefty wooden table in the dining room where we were fed generously, not forgetting the bottles of grape juice that filled our glasses like a river.
One day I then went out for a walk, down the valley and looking up at the big green hill that rose above the ground like a green moon rising above the horizon and there on the slope of the overwhelming greenery sat the girl, lost in her thoughts; lost in herself; lost in her journey from Canada to France. Alone, lonely, surrounding herself with the ghosts of her past; with a tangible emotional loss that she seemed to be lost in. Had she received an unhappy letter; had she lost a friend, or a boyfriend; had life cut her off from her roots out here in St. Laurent, France. The green hill surrounded her, bled into her until she became as green as the hill and then she seemed to disappear from sight. And now I am sitting here wondering still, who was she? What was she doing there? Who was she?
After completing a creative writing course at Bow Idea Store I was invited to read something at their yearly event that took place at Bethnal Green library; on the 3rd July 2025. I had a very good time and enjoyed the event which included singers and a jazz band.