painter and printmaker, was born in Sydney, daughter of Maria Graeme Connon and Robert Gordon Craig, a Sydney surgeon. She gained an economics degree from Sydney University. Her first husband, Dr Lee Brown, a surgeon in partnership with her father and a keen aviator, died in 1934 when he crashed his plane; their daughter, Mitty Lee Brown , was born in 1921 in San Francisco. From 1927 to 1932 Ailsa studied with Thea Proctor and Adelaide Perry at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School and contributed to the student magazine, Undergrowth . She exhibited with the Society of Artists in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In 1935 Ailsa married, for the second time, her flying teacher G.U. (Scotty) Allan, a flying ace, and thereafter signed her work 'Ailsa Allan’. They lived in Brisbane for two years (1935-36), then returned to NSW and set up house at Palm Beach. In 1938 Proctor praised her wood engravings, reproducing two of them to accompany her article 'Modern Art in Sydney’ (basically a justification of the Contempory Art Society). Ailsa Allan, she said, had begun wood engraving 'three years ago’ and by then had produced
hardly more than a dozen, so that her technique as yet shows some weakness. Wood engraving is a branch of art in which technique is of great importance, but still not as important as the idea expressed … she has an original vision. Engraved lines in the modern woodcut are not used merely to give tone, but … to assist the general rhythm of the design, and Mrs. Allan has this strong feeling of rhythm. “Open, Please”, is an example of the importance of the idea. Of what value is an assured technique if it is only camouflage for a barren mind?
Allan’s linocuts were reproduced in Manuscripts in the early 1930s, including Waiting 1933 (man at dance waiting for partner), issue 4 (February 1933, p.19: ill. Sydney by Design [ SBD ], 32) and The Mother 1934, published in issue 8 (1934), National Gallery of Australia (ill. Butler SBD , 14). She abandoned lino-block printing for wood engraving after 1936 and her later prints are based on everyday experiences rather than decorative images, eg Dressmakers 1937, woodcut 25.2 × 17.2 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Ailsa Allan was killed near her Palm Beach home on 9 February 1943 when hit by a bicycle (according to Butler).
- Writers:
- Johnson, Heather
Note: Primary biographer
Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
