Andrew Cranston
Wept for a day gone by, 2021
pigment and gum arabic on hardback book cover
26.1 x 19.1 cm
10 1/4 x 7 1/2 in
10 1/4 x 7 1/2 in
The table and chairs, their legs and bodies, made me think of animals, cattle, horses, and specifically one of my favourite photographs, those horses on a Hebridean beach by Paul...
The table and chairs, their legs and bodies, made me think of animals, cattle, horses, and specifically one of my favourite photographs, those horses on a Hebridean beach by Paul Strand. I love the sight of a standing sleeping horse, an uncanny thing.
The chairs are figurative, stand-ins for people. Legs and arms. The leaves all yellow, about to fall. (Is that why it’s called The Fall?) I light a candle. It cheers me up and gives the picture a flame of focus.
_________
Ten recent paintings:
Winter vegetables ( to Robert Bell Cranston); watching the box; Wept for a day gone by; If you see something that doesn’t look right (after Hammershoi); snow globe; On the corner ( the way Jude stood); Keramic ( an everyday intrusion of someone I didn’t like); Messages; Landing; Without you
Ten recent paintings all made with pigment and gum arabic. These paintings have something to do with being inside, indoors all this time. Not just in the period of making but the time before, this period of time since March 2020, the time of covid and lockdowns.
Still lifes, interiors, views from the window.
The focus has been very narrow and the aim small.
I’ve felt a bit ill, not very ill but slightly ill. I haven’t had covid but Lorna has. I don’t feel strong. I feel weak. I cry easily. I feel like making slight gestures in my paintings, a breath on a window pane, steam from the kettle, a spiders web ( which are actually very tough really, relatively, feats of engineering.)
When I walk to the shops for milk and bread ( for “messages” as they say in Scotland)
I feel dizzy. I wonder if it’s because of the sudden change of space, that my horizon opens up and seems overwhelmingly big, a world without walls. I hurry back indoors. To the security of walls, interior space.
I feel like making work that is hardly there at all, something gentle like my mums home-baking. I think about a dark brown apricot cake she made and her meringues, chewy perfect off-white meringues, my mum’s magical alchemy. I feel close to my long dead parents just now. I miss them but I’m glad they missed all this.
I feel slightly alienated from the world at the moment actually, from its concerns. These paintings are saying nothing of any significance and I’m not even sure what, if anything, they might communicate to anyone else, other than relating something about the awareness - the ‘nowness of now’ as Dennis Potter called it - of being in a specific time and space. You ( reader, viewer) are in your space, and each of us are locked into something, our situation and feelings. Together in alone-ness.
I am painting like an old lady just now. I am thinking of Vanessa Bell, Gwen John maybe even Agnes Martin. Artists that retreated and worked secretively, quietly. I feel I’ve retreated just now. I Can’t face the studio. The building where the studios are is the HQ for New York Times during COP 26 and so the security is tight, we have to get searched and show a pass we’ve been issued with. Lorna has been going and comes back a bit annoyed that she has to explain who she is and what she’s doing with a bag full of turps bottles. I can’t be bothered explaining so am staying in the house…’ working from home’, which is strange. In between painting I make soup and stews and do laundry.
The paintings are being made accumulatively, little marks here and there, building to something.
I feel like I am on an artists residency, lots of my stuff, materials and research information, is not around me. I feel limited in a useful way, I am looking much more at what is around, out the window and in the flat, under my nose, exploring.
These paintings have nothing to say and they are saying it.
A plane circles in the sky all day over Partick and Finnieston looking for suspicious activity and it is said that above that plane, high above the clouds, is another plane hardly visible also circling, watching the watcher. Air of paranoia. The radio announces that the threat of a likely terrorist attack has been moved from substantial to severe. More incentive to stay in.
The chairs are figurative, stand-ins for people. Legs and arms. The leaves all yellow, about to fall. (Is that why it’s called The Fall?) I light a candle. It cheers me up and gives the picture a flame of focus.
_________
Ten recent paintings:
Winter vegetables ( to Robert Bell Cranston); watching the box; Wept for a day gone by; If you see something that doesn’t look right (after Hammershoi); snow globe; On the corner ( the way Jude stood); Keramic ( an everyday intrusion of someone I didn’t like); Messages; Landing; Without you
Ten recent paintings all made with pigment and gum arabic. These paintings have something to do with being inside, indoors all this time. Not just in the period of making but the time before, this period of time since March 2020, the time of covid and lockdowns.
Still lifes, interiors, views from the window.
The focus has been very narrow and the aim small.
I’ve felt a bit ill, not very ill but slightly ill. I haven’t had covid but Lorna has. I don’t feel strong. I feel weak. I cry easily. I feel like making slight gestures in my paintings, a breath on a window pane, steam from the kettle, a spiders web ( which are actually very tough really, relatively, feats of engineering.)
When I walk to the shops for milk and bread ( for “messages” as they say in Scotland)
I feel dizzy. I wonder if it’s because of the sudden change of space, that my horizon opens up and seems overwhelmingly big, a world without walls. I hurry back indoors. To the security of walls, interior space.
I feel like making work that is hardly there at all, something gentle like my mums home-baking. I think about a dark brown apricot cake she made and her meringues, chewy perfect off-white meringues, my mum’s magical alchemy. I feel close to my long dead parents just now. I miss them but I’m glad they missed all this.
I feel slightly alienated from the world at the moment actually, from its concerns. These paintings are saying nothing of any significance and I’m not even sure what, if anything, they might communicate to anyone else, other than relating something about the awareness - the ‘nowness of now’ as Dennis Potter called it - of being in a specific time and space. You ( reader, viewer) are in your space, and each of us are locked into something, our situation and feelings. Together in alone-ness.
I am painting like an old lady just now. I am thinking of Vanessa Bell, Gwen John maybe even Agnes Martin. Artists that retreated and worked secretively, quietly. I feel I’ve retreated just now. I Can’t face the studio. The building where the studios are is the HQ for New York Times during COP 26 and so the security is tight, we have to get searched and show a pass we’ve been issued with. Lorna has been going and comes back a bit annoyed that she has to explain who she is and what she’s doing with a bag full of turps bottles. I can’t be bothered explaining so am staying in the house…’ working from home’, which is strange. In between painting I make soup and stews and do laundry.
The paintings are being made accumulatively, little marks here and there, building to something.
I feel like I am on an artists residency, lots of my stuff, materials and research information, is not around me. I feel limited in a useful way, I am looking much more at what is around, out the window and in the flat, under my nose, exploring.
These paintings have nothing to say and they are saying it.
A plane circles in the sky all day over Partick and Finnieston looking for suspicious activity and it is said that above that plane, high above the clouds, is another plane hardly visible also circling, watching the watcher. Air of paranoia. The radio announces that the threat of a likely terrorist attack has been moved from substantial to severe. More incentive to stay in.