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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, I'm Ben Luke and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast from The Art Newspaper in which I talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and of course other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work.
Chapter 2: What influences shaped Andrew Cranston's artistic journey?
And this episode is A Brush With Andrew Cranston. Before I continue, look out for a video version of this interview on the YouTube channels of The Art Newspaper and Bloomberg Connects. Andrew Cranston's works draw on experiences, moments seen, felt or remembered, which are filtered, embellished, complicated and sometimes almost obliterated through the process of being painted.
As well as reflecting on personal events from childhood memories and the recollections of family members to more recent rituals and exploits, Andy's pictures are rich in cultural resonance. Images and ideas from the history of art and cinema, from poems and television series, are central to his work, whether as a core motif or as a subtle reference in the title.
As a result, his practice is deeply concerned with time and history, not just in recalling past events and experiences and transforming them in the present, but in his materials and methods.
he often uses the covers of old hardback books bleached by light over the years as a surface for instance and the paintings hold time in their very physicality in the immediacy of a painted gesture in the steady build-up of layers and marks and in the hints of their journeys to completion Andy's paintings reflect his medium's capacity for thrillingly diverse effects, modes and moods.
They are full of poetry and longing, as well as absurdity and joy. Andy was born in 1969 in Hawick in Scotland, and the places and spaces of Hawick appear frequently, whether in images recalling his family home growing up or the golf course there, which he's painted on several occasions, including in a recent painting called I Thought I Saw an Eagle from 2026.
He studied at Manchester Polytechnic and the Grays School of Art in Aberdeen in Scotland and then gained an MA at the Royal College of Art in London where he first met the painter Peter Doig who was a visiting tutor and has proved an important influence. In 1997 he moved to Glasgow where he continues to live today.
From 1999, he returned to Gray's School of Art to begin teaching there, a process he credits with making him examine more deeply the idea of being an artist and, as he put it, to articulate intellectually and practically what had been mainly intuitive until then. But while he occasionally showed his work, this was largely a period of what Andy himself has described as anonymity.
Only in the past 15 years or so has he shown more frequently and to widespread interest. acclaim. He said that that period of relatively little visibility between the mid-1990s and 2010s afforded him, quote, freedoms to develop, experiment, make mistakes, change, and perhaps find my voice or voices without any spotlight or attention on me.
Even still, there are many paintings made earlier in his career that reflect the intensity, wit and material richness that characterises his work today.
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Chapter 3: How does Andrew Cranston's work reflect personal memories?
It's one of Cutler's more sincere lyrics in which he reflects on lying in said field and notes the yellow of a flower and the blue of his lover's eyes. As with many of Andy's references, one can identify a clear connection with his approach to painting, the way in which within an atmospheric scene, particular and sometimes unexpected details might leap out.
He's discussed how his art is a fight with visibility, a game of making things seen, barely seen. And I began our conversation by asking him, is that game the central concern of his work?
I think it's a consistent thing, yeah. When I'm sort of working with an image or a form, you almost can see how to create a relationship that's sometimes challenging. So, yeah, I think it is quite a strong force that takes over sometimes. Or, you know, I find myself doing. I think I gravitate towards things that are quite close together.
so that there is a bit of work for the viewer to do, actually, in a way, so things don't just get given to you.
There's a really nice example, I think, in the sense that you said that in one of the paintings... you could read one form either as a snake, because you paint a lot of adders, but also you could read it as a piece of measuring tape. And I think that's the sort of productive ambiguity that lies at the heart of the work, that we're encouraged to look and to find in the work.
in a way that is a kind of creative act on our part, if you like.
Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm kind of all for misunderstandings, creative misunderstandings, you know, in the sense that I think how the thing is read is often kind of not clear always, but there's interest in ways in which you interpret things, you know.
Are there moments where you feel that a form is almost too clear and you will deliberately muddy it, if you like?
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, I think it's a push and pull between something that's like instantly readable and then you want to slow that down. So it's something to do with the speed of how we receive things and how the image kind of releases itself in a way that...
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Chapter 4: What materials and methods does Andrew Cranston use in his paintings?
It's happened, but I suppose through drawing, I sometimes draw the paintings in a way, you know, from them sort of thing. Is this in the middle of making? Yeah, yes. So sometimes you're just sort of... I don't really do preliminary studies. I'm kind of sort of more working it out as I'm going.
And so that's a kind of moment where you can see jumps and you obviously see it when you take pictures of it and in different stages. So it's something you're translating into tone all the time. Is it working on that level as well as the color? There's definitely a relationship there.
Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask about the sort of deliberate unorthodoxies that you use in the work. I've made a list here because I think it's really important. You're using distemper paint, which is an unusual paint now. It was used a lot in modernism, for instance, and we can come back to that. But you deliberately encourage like a Hessian weave, a thick Hessian weave in some paintings.
You're severing parts of paintings and attaching them to others. You're painting with bleach and varnish. You're pressing lined index cards into the paint and using their imprint, that sort of thing. It seems to me that you almost set yourself kind of formal challenges by disrupting your own actions. Tell us about that.
Yeah, I mean, there is sort of almost obstacles in the way sometimes, but, you know, in a way, I'm still a bit of an old punk, you know, when it comes to materials, you know, and sometimes working with something that's either not an art material, you know, it's like bleach or something, or it's...
you know die or something first it was a sort of slight form of evasion really to the the scariness of just painting directly yeah you know it's quite naked in a kind of way you're you're exposed very very obviously in a way so there was kind of ways of somehow printing the marks on or or you know finding tools that that would make the mark kind of different um
And then it becomes a way to really move work somewhere, start work. I don't know if you've come across this, but in Scotland, certainly the part of Scotland I was from, when people say how, they mean why. Somebody I knew went up to Scotland and it took them six months to realise when the kids were saying, yeah, but how? That actually meant why?
But the how of things is so strongly related to why.
That's nice. So it's forms of questioning in a way. It's an objective questioning of your own practice in a way or your own methods.
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Chapter 5: How does Andrew Cranston's art relate to time and history?
Yeah. It's sort of guarding against slickness. Yes. Yes. Skills are... complicated thing for artists you know because you know i think when i was younger he had that tendency to show off in a painting you know and never drop that kind of skill and then
Yeah, I think that can obviously really get in the way of a work, you know, where it's, I suppose, in music when people are showing off on a guitar or something like that. It's like to punk. It can be so boring. Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah, there's that. So... There's a lot of nuance sometimes in things that are rough or, you know, you mentioned the Hessian.
I quite like the thought of sometimes being brutal and subtle at the same time, you know, kind of that actually there's a lot of subtlety in brutality here.
and it's often a death when you're being too precious with work you're trying to refine it in a kind of way too soon yeah so there's ways in which i slightly disrupt if you like traditional painting but i think it started out as a sort of almost tricky thing you know like you thought i'll do this line with thread rather than draw it and
I think there's a lovely counterintuitiveness about that. Like, for instance, I'm thinking of some of the works where you use bleach. They are absolutely, in a way, the most fragile images. And one thinks of bleach as an utterly destructive force. And it really is like household bleach, right? It's domestos that you're using, right? Yeah.
But I'm thinking of that work, which is based on a photograph taken by, you think maybe taken by Dylan Thomas, which appeared in a book by his wife, right? And it's basically the most fragile of all. It's almost not there. And yet you've achieved it through this utterly destructive force. And that sort of counterintuitiveness seems to be something you enjoy in a way.
Well, I mean, we'll get on to maybe the book cover paintings, but... Often the books I collect are all got a kind of history to them and many of them are bleached with a light. Part of the books sat underneath a load of other books for decades or something, you know, so there's a bleaching that way. So in a way it occurred to me to manipulate that further.
And what's interesting when I've worked with it, there's almost a kind of photographic kind of approach where, you know, You know, you might be developing a photograph and it's just appearing and you're interested when you stop it developing. Yes. So there's a kind of point of putting the bleach on and waiting for it to reach a certain point tonally or something like that and then stopping it.
It's a chemical process. Yeah, exactly. So there's a sort of slow emergence of something. That fragile thing, it's a real quality in art I always like very much is when things are just barely there. Yeah. Or they've just survived, you know, in a way. Yeah, that's lovely.
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Chapter 6: How does Andrew Cranston incorporate humor and absurdity into his art?
They're so sort of still cat-like, but he stretches and exaggerates and just, you know, plays with it.
Anatomy of the cat. That's the marvellous thing you can do and you do it a lot in your paintings is that sense in which an object that we know... can be twisted or stretched in ways that you can only really do with paint, you know, and they become then something else.
Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, his relationship to the world and the translation of the world is so interesting, you know, that he seems to have a kind of sense of being what it is to be inside your head and looking out the optical, you know what I mean? You're not seeing like a photograph you're,
You know, you've got things floating in front of your eyes and, you know, the colour you might look at, you've still got that etched on your retina when you're looking at something else.
I used to have really terrible migraines at one point and that seemed quite a Bonnard kind of experience, you know, where it's just sort of... I take that all from his work, that, you know, that there's that so interesting relationship between looking and you're representing something, you know.
I see it sort of transformed, like there is a painting of yours, of course, which is called Dreams of the Everyday, another called Fairly Liquid, where, you know, it seemed to me that those are absolutely squarely responses to Bonnard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But also there's a painting which you made of the fish, which I know are in an Edinburgh museum, where you really focus on the mosaic. And that seems to me to, again, have come from those extraordinary depictions of tiles in the Bonnard bath paintings. So there's ways in which it enters the work by the back door, if you like.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, those passages of the tiles and the floor tiles in the bathroom, I think they're
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of cultural references in Cranston's paintings?
There's that marvellous painting she did of the bath with the boat that sort of floats, and that spatially is just such an amazing picture, actually. Yes.
I know, there's a sort of...
kind of magical realism quality to the thing where the boat yes we read it as on the surface this toy boat but there's something very heightened about it in a kind of way absolutely yeah i wanted to talk about distemper and it makes me immediately think of matisse because i feel like his distemper paintings were so almost programmatic in the sense that he goes to see giotto did he use it a lot he used it in like things like le luxe the great 1907 picture le luxe he's
He's using distemper because he's seen Giotto and he aspires to create a modern form of those kind of fresco paintings. And obviously distemper has that quality about it.
Yeah, absolutely. It's a really nice surface, you know, especially the... the rabbit skin glue version kind of thing, where you get this lovely chalkiness and sometimes slightly sparkliness. But yeah, probably similar kind of sort of feeling. I mean, I had noticed that Tal R was using it and Peter Doig as well. So it began to interest me.
And especially when the larger paintings I was making, this was maybe... more than 10 years ago, but I wasn't completely satisfied with him. So I kind of felt like taking up a piece of Clement Greenberg's advice, nothing else interests me, but where he said, if you want to change your work, change your method. Yeah. That came into my mind. And so I thought, I'll try this.
And it actually instantly kind of suited me because you tend to think about one colour at a time in a way. Yeah. Because, you know, you might mix up a pigment with size or a binder of some sort. And it's not the same as oil painting where you might have 20, 30 colours, you know, you're dipping into them. You tend to work in this kind of sort of...
saturated way with one colour and then another colour brought in. So very light fresco painting. Yeah. It can be a bit of a... You've got pots and they have to be kept warm and, you know, it's in some ways a sort of... It's a faff. But it did lead me to a way of working that felt new but also sort of familiar somehow at the same time and...
Is it about sort of the different method allows you different forms of thinking space in a way about what you're doing? So you're involved in the making. There's a completely different conception of time as you would have with oil. But there's something about those pauses or the sort of structure of time that makes you think differently about how you're going to make the image ultimately.
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Chapter 8: What role does silence and visibility play in Cranston's works?
And especially this thinking and almost separations.
You've already talked about Talar and Peter Doig there, but which contemporary artist do you most admire?
Yeah, Talar and Peter Doig, definitely. I really like Kai Althoff as well.
But do you feel like you're in sort of dialogue in a way with those painters? I mean, of course, you have talked to Peter on record, for instance. But there's a kind of to and fro, which is informal. It's not like Matisse and Picasso almost kind of responding to each other through paint. But there's a sense in which there is a kind of open dialogue there with other painters that work here today.
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I think if you have any kind of audience in the studio, it's other painters often, you know, you might be kind of somehow having your head, you know, that... And none more so than Lorna Robertson, your wife, of course, who's in the neighbouring studio. She's next door.
So, yeah, we are in constant discussion about things that are developing and, you know, or even notions for paintings and old paintings that come out and things. So... So, yeah, so that's been such a gift, really, sort of, you know, having that dialogue. But, you know, I've got a lot of friends in London, you know, a painter, Paul Housley, I'm in contact with a lot.
He was a tutor at Royal College, of course. No, we were students kind of actually at the same time. And Peter was teaching there as well. So Kai Alto's work I really do enjoy every time I'm seeing it. There's a real strangeness there, right? Absolutely. And they're melancholy somehow as well. There's a sort of real pathos and sort of sadness to them. Yeah, kind of longing in some way.
Yeah, they're very strange. And it's the strangeness that I kind of respond to that
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