Painter, draughtsman, writer and polemicist, and teacher, born in Thurnscoe, Yorkshire. He attended school in Darlington, meeting Harold Hurrell; was at Barnsley School of Art, 1958–60, getting to know David Bainbridge; and was at Slade School of Fine Art, 1960–4. Atkinson felt that teaching there was not relevant to the society in which he lived. In 1962 he showed Dead Cat on a Runway, at Young Contemporaries, where his Postcard from Ypres won the Arts Council Prize in 1963. World War I was to remain a preoccupation as an artist. Taught part-time at Birmingham College of Art, 1965–7; at Coventry College of Art (later Lanchester Polytechnic), 1966–73, where he met Michael Baldwin; took up a Gulbenkian Foundation Fellowship in 1975, working at Sidney Stringer School, Coventry on the Community Education Video Project; and lectured in fine art at Leeds University from 1977. In 1964 Atkinson helped form the group Fine Artz with John Bowstead, Roger Jeffs and Bernard Jennings, but left it in 1966. In 1967 Atkinson and Baldwin produced a series of prints and texts together, including Notes on Time Show, Declaration Propositions and Types of quasi-intention. The group Art & Language was founded in 1968, the first issue of Art-Language, a conceptual art journal, appearing in 1969, edited by Atkinson, Bainbridge, Baldwin and Hurrell. Atkinson left the group in 1975, and the following year a show of his subsequent work was organised for Midland Group, Nottingham, with a tour. Atkinson showed at Sydney and Venice Biennales in 1984 and in 1985 at John Moores Liverpool Exhibition. Had a retrospective at Whitechapel Art Gallery, with tour, 1983–4; another key show, indicating how Atkinson had consistently examined the meaning and purpose of art, was toured from Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, 1996. Arts Council holds his work. Lived for a time in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, where in 2003 the Art Gallery & Museum showed his 4 Series 1974–92. In 2004 the Jeffrey Charles Gallery exhibited Atkinson’s work and the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Bath featured the work of Atkinson, Bainbridge and David Rushton.