Andrew Cranston

Yeah.

Yeah, before you know it, you're in.

You know, it's not like a kind of big operation to actually get into the paintings.

But yeah, Hunterian's a fantastic little museum.

Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?

I think it would be through poetry more than visual art, funnily.

I was about 18.

I sort of stumbled across a poet called Hugh McDiarmid.

he's lesser known outside Scotland and faded a wee bit from view but the thing was really about his work was that he was born from a town 20 miles away from my town and although he was this very stridently modernist poet that was great friends with T.S.

Eliot and Joyce and stuff like that he was often referring to places that I knew very well

And there they were in art form, you know.

I think it was the first instance where I felt there could be a confidence in kind of local things that, you know, art wasn't necessarily always made in Paris or New York or London.

Right.

There was a validity to actually what you were experiencing and it could be transformed and it could be.

He mainly wrote in Scots kind of language, but wrote about, you know, kind of complex ideas in a sort of form that, you know, and up until that point, I'd only seen in either almost comic form.

kind of way or a certain folkiness kind of thing and he had a modernity to him and I think he was a gateway kind of drug to other poetry other Scottish poets but also wider Irish poets and

I felt my brain change, really, when I sort of discovered his work.

I mean, I think probably not right away.

I was sort of, you know, a somewhat lost teenager.

But yeah, it became all part of it.