Ingleby | Andrew Cranston | Never a Joiner

This summer, as part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, Ingleby presents an exhibition of new paintings by Glasgow based Andrew Cranston.

Andrew Cranston (b.1969) is a painter-storyteller, a way of working that is enhanced by his often painting on the linen bound covers of old books.  His stories coalesce in the process of making - the paintings emerging gradually through the manipulation of his materials: layering, lacquering, bleaching, collaging and constantly re-working his way into images that seem to shift backwards and forwards in time. He has described one of his works as ‘a painting that came out of my brush one day’, a statement that sums up his approach. They are resolutely contemporary in spirit and yet connected by a strong thread to painters of the past, especially perhaps to the intimism of Vuillard and Bonnard, or to Matisse or Munch. These are narrative paintings, drawn from the artist’s memory and observations of life and liberally sprinkled with reference to cinema, literature, and art history.  This exhibition presents a new sequence of large scale canvases, alongside the book cover paintings for which he has become so well known in recent years.

A new publication devoted to the book cover paintings will be published to celebrate the exhibition, featuring the artist’s commentaries on his works. A book launch to celebrate the publication’s release, including a signing and exhibition walk through with the artist will be held as an Edinburgh Art Festival event on Saturday 19^th August at 3pm.

"Yellow. A lot of the paintings start yellow. When I was growing up, a friend of my dad’s from Manchester used to come and visit us. One time he brought us packs of paper he said had fallen off the back of a lorry. There was so much of this paper that we never needed any more paper for the whole rest of our childhood – there was always paper to draw on and make comics. Most of it was yellow, a. very pale, quite cold yellow, and most of the drawings I made when I was young were on this yellow paper. Whether that’s the reason, I don’t know. Yellow’s an interesting colour psychologically as well. It can feel a bit sick and a bit ill sometimes, jaundiced or something. It’s the colour that is the most mysterious to me." 

- Andrew Cranston

Read: Andrew Cranston, Cultured, 2023

Read: Andrew Cranston in the studio, Ocula, 2023

Read: Andrew Cranston, The Scotsman, 2023 

Read: Andrew Cranston, Apollo Magazine, 2023

Read: Andrew Cranston, Spectator, 2023