Andrew Cranston: Etchings: Ground Floor Gallery

Glasgow Print Studio is delighted to present five new editions by Andrew Cranston, a Scottish painter living and working in Glasgow.

Cranston's work depicts dream-like worlds based on liminal spaces, typically in domestic environments. His narrative vignettes draw on personal history as well as artistic and anecdotal sources. Through layers of luminous paint and ruminative imagery, his darkly humorous compositions recall Post-Impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. He works on multiple pieces at the same time, with the finished images gradually emerging through the manipulation and re-working of materials: layering, lacquering, bleaching, collaging. He described one of his works as 'a painting that came out of my brush one day', a statement that sums up his approach.

"For this body of work in etching, Cranston worked closely with Master Printmaker Alistair Gow, to experiment and play, discovering a new language in spit bite and soap ground etching processes. The resulting works invite the viewer into a complex but dreamy world.

If You Know Your History locates the viewer in a dreamscape that could be Glasgow, invoking childhood memories of standing before the 8000-year-old giant elk in Ulster Museum. The title gives a gentle nod to museums but also a song often heard on the Glasgow football terraces. However, Cranston's agility as visual storyteller leaves plenty of room for the viewer to find their own meaning, connect to their own memories or to simply enjoy the fluid mark making and invocation of place and time.

In Mirror Phase, a bird's inquisitive gaze looks back at the viewer in sharp focus, as the room beyond the confines of the cage bars hovers with a softness created by painting directly onto the copper plate with acid. Cranston slips easily between painting and printmaking and in the process creates a new language and world for us to inhabit."

Claire Forsyth, Creative Director.

"Andy's etchings are a testament to his skill as a painter, achieving a lightness of touch that can be surprising in this medium."

Alistair Gow, Master Printmaker.

Andrew Cranston (b. 1969, Hawick), studied at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen and then earned a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London where Peter Doig and Adrian Berg were his tutors. He returned to Gray's to lecture between 1997 and 2017 and is represented by Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh and Karma in New York. In 2014, he was awarded the Arts Foundation fellowship by the Royal Scottish Academy.

Recent solo exhibitions include his first solo public institution exhibition, What made you stop here? at Yorkshire's Hepworth Wakefield in November 2023; Ingleby Gallery, London (2023); Modern Art, London (2022); Karma, New York (2021); and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2018).  Cranston's work is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; He Art Museum, Shunde, China; Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Royal College of Art, London; and Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, among others.