The cover stories of Andrew Cranston

Certain animals, it seems, come with their own energy and Cranston brings to his depictions of animals the attentiveness of a painter, not a pet owner. He has previously mentioned the pet monkey called Cookham (nothing to do with Stanley Spencer, he assures me) that his father had as a child, but his own childhood home in Hawick, in the Scottish Borders, was pet-free. Cats – which also make fairly frequent appearances in his work – were ‘seen as the enemy’ by his gardener father. In the book accompanying ‘Never a Joiner’ he writes: ‘I prefer dogs but cats are more mysterious.’ In person, he admits that ‘I don’t mind cats.’ Eventually, and with some reluctance, he goes so far as to admit that he likes them.

Cat and cheeseboard (2018), Andrew Cranston. Private collection. Courtesy Andrew Cranston and Ingleby, Edinburgh; © the artist

A domestic pet offers, he says, ‘a sort of added homeliness’, but also comes with its own other attractions. ‘I’m fascinated by the incongruity of humans and animals in shared spaces,’ he says. In an unexpected turn, ‘Tortoises have turned up quite a lot as an animal that I’ve painted and for various, slightly kind of comical reasons.’ The reasons are to do with surprisingly human concerns: ‘Painters being a bit like tortoises, in it for the long haul, rather than this other sprint. And they hide away, and they’ve got a different sense of time, haven’t they, tortoises? But there’s this sort of hardiness to them and of course there’s a slight strangeness to them.’ The strangeness includes, for Cranston, outliving the families to which they belong, but also ‘the shape of them, their abstraction if you like’. For the artist, life and painting seem to intersect so often that they become indistinguishable: ‘There’s all sorts of driving factors within a painting,’ he says, ‘and, of course, the kind of visual shapes and forms that you’re playing with could be an initial, actual impulse, but then you’re kind of also interested in what its status says within the world’ – and so the tortoise crawls into his canvases, his newly imagined world.

The beautiful south (2019), Andrew Cranston. Private collection. Courtesy Andrew Cranston and Ingleby, Edinburgh; © the artist

The strangeness of animals in the human world sometimes tips over into something more sinister. In A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot day to drink there (2023) – a Cranston title is always something to relish – the flat he used to share with his partner Lorna Robertson is invaded by a giant snake, which gets perilously close to their son’s cot. In a note to this work, Cranston writes: ‘Poussin’s landscape with snake, Hockney’s snake, the snake in The Little Prince. Snakes are just a great shape, a great form to paint and do the visual job here that previously pipes, cables and flexes did.’ Art historical animals loom large in his work and his conversation. He’s a fan of Bonnard’s ‘quite weird’ cats, the mastiff in Velázquez’s Las Meninas and ‘the wee terrier in the Arnolfini Portrait’. But the snakes still come with a serving of terror. ‘My mother was terrified of snakes, without ever having any real need to be, I mean, it’s not like we lived in Australia.’ Just as his mother seems to have been afraid of an idea rather than a real threat, though, so the snake in the picture might be emblematic rather than actual: ‘It’s a kind of intrusion, something that’s not right or uncanny, but it’s sort of psychological, I suppose, it could be a real snake but it could be a metaphorical snake.’

A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot day to drink there (2023), Andrew Cranston. Photo: John McKenzie; courtesy Andrew Cranston and Ingleby, Edinburgh; © the artist

Metaphorical snakes lead us to D.H. Lawrence, whose animal poems Cranston admires. Lawrence has ‘a kind of sympathy but a completely unsentimental sympathy,’ Cranston finds: ‘He acknowledges his almost territorial defensiveness against animals.’ It makes sense that someone who is interested in how things relate to one another should admire a writer who looks at animals from a distance, but there is a technical flourish in Lawrence’s poems that also seems aligned with Cranston’s work. Cranston describes Lawrence’s poems as ‘amazing things […] almost thinking aloud, you know, they feel unedited.’ That sense of naturalness, of pinning down thoughts, seems analogous to the way Cranston paints.

Walled garden (after Paul Klee) (2023), Andrew Cranston. Private collection. Courtesy Andrew Cranston and Ingleby, Edinburgh; © the artist

The paintings often start in the centre of the canvas and grow from there. In Walled garden (after Paul Klee) (2023) there is even a section where you can see a patch of canvas covering up something that had gone before. The canvases are also records of a mind changing, of thinking not aloud but in plain sight. ‘There’s a lot about collage or even the mentality of collage’ that interests him, he says. He doesn’t mean merely layering things up: ‘In a way it becomes a way to rupture the reading of a picture.’ ‘Never a joiner’ as a title for his work takes on other meanings: he doesn’t quite hide the joints of his works. It might be tempting to mistake the works for easy paintings but he bursts that easy way of looking at them by registering how they were wrought – never a joiner but full of joints – or is that disruptions?

Yet when he talks about actually painting he makes it sound like a smoother, and riskier, proposition: ‘It’s tricky with paintings, when they become a very delicate operation and you’re kind of coaxing the thing along – it’s one false move and you’ve wrecked it.’ The way to combat this threat is through vigilance. ‘You’re sometimes looking for the nature of the work, which does seem separate from you, bringing out its character. Other times you get into additions and taking in when they become part of the work, so it’s almost like anything you do can be redeemed.’

When Cranston talks, there is something very soft and relaxed about the way he speaks so it’s surprising to listen back to the conversation and hear how demanding the act of painting is. Being a painter has ‘an element of absurdity’ – not the glib absurdity of contemporary speech, but the loaded absurdity of Samuel Beckett. For Cranston, Beckett’s plays have a ‘kind of humour and bleakness that chimes with me’. It’s an absurdity that reaches its zenith in being an artist, ‘locked in this kind of circular activity, a prisoner – a happy prisoner usually – but you somehow never quite resolve anything or end anything. It’s amazingly infuriating.’ Cranston says this without sounding the slightest bit infuriated. ‘I was quite interested to read Beckett was a keen golfer,’ he says. ‘I like golf as well, it’s got a similar maddening sensation.’

Book-cover works in the studio, including a painting of Cranston’s nephew in front of Dolly the sheep. Photo: Matthew Arthur Williams

While he might describe painting as an act of maddeningly going around in circles, he interrupts the cyclical nature by introducing new techniques. Some details of his practice sound like the restrictions a poet might impose on a verse, such as using a hard brush to paint sections of a work – ‘I think it is something to do with the colour still remaining on the brush and when you go to another colour, some of that [previous] colour is still there and I think it just sort of connects bits of the painting.’ Recently, Cranston has washed a canvas in a washing machine with dye and painted on it with bleach to allow the world he is depicting to come out of the ground. ‘I think you have to almost constantly be slightly changing [what you do], slightly adapting it all the time,’ he says.

He finds that his work ‘is constantly in dialogue with someone’. It might be a canonical artist such as Titian or Velázquez, who populated Hawick’s library in a boxed set of art history books, but it might just as easily be ‘somebody’s work that you don’t know very well but you’ve just sort of absorbed the spirit of it in a kind of way, somebody like Sigmar Polke’. It would be wrong to think this dialogue results in a vast stylistic transformation. According to Cranston, the American photorealist painter Richard Estes has said that ‘he collected work that he couldn’t make, that’s what interested him, making and collect- ing work and looking at paintings with things that you wouldn’t ever think of doing or maybe even be able to do. So there’s always a slightly covetous thing about certain artists that you can just probably never make it as well [as them].’ The thing is, as he says, ‘There’s a weird nonsense about style, as if an artist had any choice in the matter. Something comes out the way it does and then you make something of that, your habits and tics, but, yeah, it doesn’t seem like a choice.’

While Cranston was tidying his studio, he found a work that he thought was lost. It is a painting on a hardcover: a figure of a boy stands in front of Dolly the sheep in the National Museum of Scotland, one arm crossed behind his back. It’s a smaller book cover than many others, so it’s easy to see how it might have fallen behind a stack of boxes, never to be seen again. The image is based on a photograph of Cranston’s nephew, but you might recognise the figure from a more recent work, Questions of travel (2023), in which a boy stands in front of not Dolly the sheep but a model of a ship in the old Glasgow Transport Museum. Both the setting and the size of the work have been translated into something completely different, a different world. Something about this recycling feels particularly pertinent. Here he is, making something out of what he’s got, taking the mess of the everyday and placing it in relation to other bits of messy life until he’s coaxed it into another way of thinking, no matter how uncanny that thinking might be.

‘Andrew Cranston: what made you stop here?’ is at the Hepworth Wakefield, from 25 November to 2 June 2024.