Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969, and now lives and works in Glasgow. His works depict dream-like worlds based on liminal spaces in domestic environments. He studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and then completed his postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Peter Doig and Adrian Berg.
Engaging with the layered emotional quality and pathos of everyday life, as well as a strong sense of place, be it real or imagined, Cranston’s evocatively titled paintings contain compelling and intriguing narratives that have the collaged dream-like quality of recollection and what he calls ‘creative misremembering’. He said ‘above all what is important to me in a painting is a mood, the atmosphere of it…painting is an act of remembering and forgetting, covering and uncovering, tracing and retracing, getting lost and finding a way’.
Cranston’s 2023/2024 show What made you stop here? at The Hepworth Wakefield was his first solo exhibition in a public gallery. What made you stop here? consisted of 38 new and recent paintings that range from large-scale canvases to intimate works painted on old linenbound book covers, comprising subjects that include still life, landscape, seascape, portraits, and interior scenes.
