-
Artworks
Andrew Cranston
Still life with Pots and Pans, 2020oil and varnish on hardback book cover25.8 x 20 cm
10 1/8 x 7 7/8 inPaintings are made sometimes by accumulation, nudge nudge nudge of paint, without design or revision, they grow like a termite mound, the result of a thousand little additions. Try it....Paintings are made sometimes by accumulation, nudge nudge nudge of paint, without design or revision, they grow like a termite mound, the result of a thousand little additions. Try it. Put one thing in, then another, then leave it to marinate and then add something else…on it goes until it’s full up.
The space recreates itself as it goes…like how a child realises space in a drawing, how they show beyond or behind as above.
Thinking of that William Nicholson painting in Liverpool called ‘The Hundred jugs’.
Those Le Creuset pots and casserole dishes which are so nice but so pricey. I thought I’d give myself some of them, at least in a painting. And those appealing heavy black pots, like the ones for making tortilla’s. Or just plain eggs like those ones getting fried (poached?) in that Velasquez in Edinburgh. Like the ones at Liza’s kitchen given to her by various Aunts, they weigh a ton and each one comes with an interesting back story.
Serving food I like to put the pots on boards on the table, a habit we picked up in Germany. Help yourself.
Thoughts of Cezanne. He annoys me but slowly I am coming round to him.
Thoughts of William Scott. Those interlocking or separate shapes of pots and pans, a tilted table top. Scott wrote that "if the guitar was to Braque his Madonna, the frying pan could be my guitar.” I didn’t have exactly an austere Protestant upbringing in Greenock and Enniskillen to underpin this but still enough of one in Hawick (with war generation parents) to respond to a certain stripped down basic-ness with some recognition.
Scott’s paintings deeply resonate with me.
1of 7