Title

Brown, Ailsa Lee.

Author

Butler, Roger

Source

[Not applicable]

Publication date

1995

Type

Biography

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Ailsa Allan

 

1898, Sydney ‑ 9 February 1943, Palm Beach, Sydney.

The daughter of Maria Graeme Connon and Robert Gordon Craig, a Sydney surgeon. Her first husband, Dr Lee‑Brown (a surgeon in partnership with her father) died in 1934. Second marriage to G.U. Allan in 1935. Studied at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School under Thea Proctor and Adelaide Perry.

 

Ailsa Craig gained a degree in economics from Sydney University. She pursued her interest in art at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School where she studied under Thea Proctor and Adelaide Perry. Craig’s sister Helen (later Helen Chambers) settled in Melbourne, also married a doctor and was interested in art.

 

Craig’s first husband, Dr Lee‑Brown, was a keen amateur aviator who was killed when he crashed his plane in 1934. Their only child, a daughter Mitty Lee‑Brown (born in San Francisco in 1922), became an artist.

 

Craig had learnt to fly during the early 1930s; in 1935 she married her flying teacher G.U. ‘Scotty’Allan, a well‑known aviator. They lived in Brisbane for two years (1935‑36) before returning to New South Wales and setting up house at Palm Beach.

 

Of Proctor’s and Perry’s students, Ailsa Allan was one of the few who continued to make prints. She exhibited them regularly and her work was reproduced in Art in Australia and Manuscripts. From 1936 she rejected linoblock printing and took up the more exacting technique of wood engraving. Her later prints reveal her departure from decorative images to original compositions based on everyday experiences.

 

Ailsa Allan was killed on 9 February 1943 when hit by a bicycle near her home at Palm Beach.

 

© Roger Butler, 1995.
Published in Sydney by design: Wood and linoblock prints by Sydney women artists between the Wars, Canberra:  National Gallery of Australia, 1995.

Last Updated

03 Oct 2024