Painting, our mutual friend: Lorna Robertson and Andrew Cranston

Glasgow Print Studio is delighted to present Painting, our mutual friend, a major two-person exhibition by Lorna Robertson and Andrew Cranston, presented as part of Glasgow International 2026.

 

Bringing together etching, woodcut, monoprint, watercolour and oil painting, the exhibition reflects the shared and distinct practices of Robertson and Cranston - artists and life partners whose work has evolved in close dialogue over many years. Exploring the porous relationship between printmaking, drawing and painting, Painting, our mutual friend considers how these mediums intersect, diverge, and continually inform one another through process, materiality and image-making.

 

Developed through a series of experimental residencies at Glasgow Print Studio between 2025 and 2026, the exhibition presents newly produced print works alongside paintings, forming a responsive and interconnected body of work shaped through collaboration, conversation and experimentation.

 

Born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969, Andrew Cranston is widely recognised for paintings that unfold like fragmented narratives - intimate, atmospheric works that emerge gradually through the manipulation of materials and surface. Often painted on found linen-bound book covers, his works are built through layering, lacquering, bleaching, collage and continual reworking, allowing images to appear and dissolve simultaneously. Cranston has described one painting as "a painting that came out of my brush one day", a phrase that encapsulates the intuitive and open-ended nature of his practice. While resolutely contemporary, his work maintains a strong affinity with painters of the past, recalling the intimism of artists such as Vuillard and Bonnard, alongside echoes of Matisse and Munch.

 

Cranston's work is held in major international collections including Tate, National Galleries of Scotland, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Portland Art Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Hall Art Foundation, among others.

 

Born in Ayr in 1967, Lorna Robertson studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and lives and works in Glasgow.  Her paintings, often combining oil paint, drawing and collage, occupy a liminal space between abstraction and figuration. Shimmering, layered compositions draw upon memory and source material such as fashion imagery, domestic interiors and still-life motifs. 

 

Robertson describes her paintings as "a tangled game of hide-and-seek that plays with the visibility and readability of an image", with the act of painting itself becoming a process of revelation. Her works conjure elusive narratives and shifting moods, where painterly gesture and fields of colour obscure and reveal familiar forms in equal measure creating  "ambiguity where the reading of the painting is open to interpretation, like the half light you get at the end of the day."  Pictorial worlds are constructed in which anonymous figures, decorative patterns and fragments of remembered experience emerge and dissolve within fields of colour and gesture. Her work explores the instability of memory, the fluidity of time and the capacity of painting to generate meaning and feeling within the viewer through acts of concealment, revelation and transformation.

 

Together, Robertson and Cranston bring two distinct yet deeply connected approaches to image-making into conversation. Painting, our mutual friend offers an insight into the shared sensibilities, influences and material investigations that underpin both practices, while foregrounding the creative possibilities that emerge between painting and print.