Andrew Cranston’s paintings draw from a variety of sources, merging his own personal history with anecdotes and jokes, passages from literature, secondary accounts, and observations from ordinary life.
A recurring theme in Cranston’s work is the representation of rooms that have been conjured up in works of literature. Notably, his two-panel work Illustration for Franz Kafka story (2nd version) (2007) depicts the bedroom of the hapless travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, from Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis (1915).
Technique
A sense of surrealism is achieved through Cranston’s repetitive layering of pigments, for which he often uses hardback book covers as his support, resulting in beautiful vignettes of dappled dreamlike scenes.
Incorporating both rough and scored oil paint alongside smoothed layers of thick varnish, Cranston offers viewers a glimpse at the lower layers of his paintings, allowing a variety of colour and texture to seep through to the surface.
This densely textured, dappled effect in works such as Deja vu and Waiting for the Bell (both 2021) recalls the patterned figurative scenes of Post-Impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.
In 2014, Cranston was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship for Painting by the Royal Scottish Academy.
