Andrew Cranston | Ryosokuin Temple: Birds, beasts and flowers

Cranston’s response to the 668-year-old temple is a series of paintings gathered under the banner Birds, beasts and flowers, a title borrowed from a book of poems by DH Lawrence, first published in 1923, which Cranston has described as “poems discovered studying in an English night class when I was 19. They opened so many modes of feeling and ways of thinking, models of how one could switch between objective and subjective registers. I liked their observational approach, recording what is being seen and thought, meandering, seemingly unedited, unpoetic, uneven, circular, even repetitive.”

Lawrence’s poems stand as individual texts but taken together they build towards a philosophical reflection on ideas of the otherness in the natural world. Thematically Cranston’s paintings take a similar turn, each individually discreet and yet loosely related, suggesting stories that merge and mingle into a kind of connected narrative. Collectively they address the refined spaces of the temple in an almost site-specific exploration of architecture and scale that shifts from room to room. There is the ‘Hojo’ - home to ceremonies and zazen meditations; the ‘Daishoin’ - once used as a study by the monks with its views of the ponds and paths of the Temple garden, and the ‘Rinchi-tei’, a pair of tiny tea houses across the garden.

Cranston’s approach to painting draws extensively on his personal experience – passing moments seen, felt or remembered - which are filtered, embellished, and occasionally obliterated, through the process of being painted. Motifs sometimes reappear from one painting to another lending an apparent sense of familiarity, and a sense of the subject being somehow shared rather than simply described, yet it is always familiarity made strange or viewed from an unexpected angle. The paintings, as the critic Ben Luke has noted are rich in cultural resonance: “Images and ideas from the history of art and cinema, from poems and television series, are central to his work, whether as a core motif or a subtle reference in the title. As a result, his practice is deeply concerned with time and history – not just recalling past events and experiences and transforming them in the present, but in his materials and methods”.

The exhibition is being staged by the artist’s representing galleries Ingleby, Edinburgh and Modern Art, London. The opening days will coincide with Art Collaboration Kyoto (an art fair at Kyoto International Conference Centre) which pairs Japanese and international galleries and where Cranston’s work will also appear on a booth shared by Ingleby and Modern Art with the Kyoto-based Nonaka-Hill.