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C H A R M E D L I F E I N G R E E C E 7 diners, goats, fig trees, harvesters and bathers. He was narrowly beaten in the contest – the two cartoons are now owned by Nuffield College, Oxford – but he continued to revisit the featured themes. e central section for Summer, with boy on wall and scarf-waving girl beside a fig tree and beneath a sun dazzling a rippled blue sea, itself became a mural (page 17). For more than 40 years this immaculate image plugged a hole in a bathroom wall in the Craxton family home in London. Although he kept his passport and retained a toehold in London, in the deepest sense John Craxton never looked back. Crete in particular – the island of harplike seas on volcanic shores and outdoor cinemas walled in honeysuckle - became the inspiration for sparkling colourist paintings and profound portraits. Greece remained the mainspring of his art even when he was expelled from the country following the 1967 military coup. During a decade of wanderings, and lengthy spells in the Craxton house in Hampstead, his heart remained firmly in the Aegean. It was probably in the late 1960s that he painted three long strips of linen with Greek motifs as lampshades for the family home – the designs comprising frieze-like processions of cats, crayfish and faces seen through fig leaves (page 23). During the middle decades of his long life he was most noted – if noticed at all - for jackets to books by his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor. But in private, and almost in secret, he was working and reworking the glittering images of Greek light, life and landscape which mirrored his own joyful existence, especially aer his return to Greece from 1977. ere was a brilliant revival of his reputation via exhibitions with the Christopher Hull Gallery from the 1980s (the enterprising dealer knocking on the painter's door in Crete without prior notice, bearing persuasive gis of Havana cigars and malt whisky). Reinventing his technique with every picture, and greatly invigorated by a love of Byzantine art, John Craxton's artistic language became absolutely his own. e dash of his early years had given way to slow experimentation, perhaps involving layer aer layer of paint. Elected a Royal Academician as late as 1993, he exhibited rarely. His studios in Chania and London seemed all but filled with large and evolving canvases which might never be finished. For his final two decades he was endlessly exploring a shiing composition of cat, tree and bird (which could and should have been translated into a fabulous modern Greek mosaic). Art, like life, remained a fascinating work in progress. John and Richard Riley at home in Chania, Crete. Photograph: Unknown

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