{"id":157812,"date":"2022-03-21T14:00:20","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T18:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=157812"},"modified":"2022-03-22T11:16:12","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T15:16:12","slug":"painting-backward-a-conversation-with-andrew-cranston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/03\/21\/painting-backward-a-conversation-with-andrew-cranston\/","title":{"rendered":"Painting Backward: A Conversation with Andrew Cranston"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Andrew Cranston’s studio. Photograph courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

Andrew Cranston, whose painting <\/span><\/em>A Room That Echoes<\/span> appears on the cover of the <\/span><\/em>Review<\/span>\u2019s new\u00a0Spring issue<\/a>, did not intend to become a painter. He grew up in Hawick, a small industrial town in Scotland, and planned to become a joiner. For a time he was in a band, and he eventually started sketching. In 1996, he completed his M.A. in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. He now lives in Glasgow with his partner, Lorna Robertson, who is also an artist and works in the studio next to his. When I first saw Cranston\u2019s show<\/span>\u00a0“Waiting for the Bell”<\/span> at Karma Gallery last summer, I was delighted. His paintings, tinged with humor and a sense of longing, invite the viewer into what feels like another person\u2019s dream. I called Cranston from New York while he was in Scotland, preparing for his next show in London. We planned to briefly discuss his work, but ended up speaking for two hours about books, golf, and monkeys.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How did you start to paint on book surfaces?<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I ran out of things to paint on, and I found some books in the studio, so I started working on them. They instantly seemed full of potential\u2014they\u00a0linked the work to a kind of narrative storytelling and literary interest quite explicitly. And a book, as opposed to a blank canvas or piece of paper, has a particular color and shape, a particular size. You\u2019re destroying the book in some way but making something else with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a fictional or poetic quality to your paintings. Do you reference real-life subjects, or are they imaginary?<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

A lot of it is rooted in experience. One of the paintings in the show depicts a kind of wall by a beach. That came out of looking at this one tiny corner of a Christopher Wood painting, particularly a wall in the painting. It triggered a memory of being on holiday in Cornwall, which was where Wood lived, and that opened up into trying to remember that holiday, and even trying to remember photographs of that holiday, which I hadn’t seen for a long, long time. So, the art is based on experience, but so many other things get woven in\u2014other paintings, scenes from films, and real places that are there in front of you, but also places remembered.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen dogs, monkeys, turtles in your paintings. Do you have any pets?<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

Not at all. My dad had, in his childhood, lots of pets, including dogs and cats and birds\u2014and a monkey his granddad ended up with. This was in the twenties or thirties in Scotland. We used to get told about this monkey quite a lot. A funny thing happened when my dad was quite old and quite close to death in a nursing home, and a woman who must have been in her nineties was brought in to see him. She suddenly sparked alive and said, \u201cI remember you. I remember your monkey.\u201d My brother told me it was a hair-standing-on-end moment, because we\u2019d heard about this monkey but never seen any photographs or anything of it. Was it really real, this monkey? And suddenly this person remembered it. <\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s something just strange about animal presences, I think, around you. I don\u2019t have any pets. A way for me to have pets is to put them in paintings.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you work on multiple paintings at once?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Winter Vegetables (To Robert Bell Cranston)<\/em>. Courtesy of the artist and the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.<\/p><\/div>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes. I will have literally fifty, at least, small paintings in progress at one time. I can\u2019t ever really decide how to finish paintings, so I\u2019ve got the same disease as C\u00e9zanne. The only way I can kind of make it work is if I just start another. <\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How do you know when a painting is done?<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s quite like bomb-disposal work, finishing a painting. You can do too much and spell things out too much. I don\u2019t really like when every t is crossed and every i is dotted. I want something that\u2019s still open-ended. Sometimes you have to paint backward, when you go past the point at which you had something that was quite mysterious and slightly ambiguous\u2014you realize you’ve made it too clear and too obvious, and then there\u2019s some undoing of that. <\/span><\/p>\n

A few years ago, I did a painting that was explicitly about writing\u2014it was a bit like the work I did for the Paris Review<\/em>\u00a0cover. I write as well, and I was interested in the aspect of writing that is very interior. Most writers do write in rooms\u2014I know that Hemingway wrote in cafes, but probably most do shut themselves away\u2014so, I was working with that idea. That painting sat for a year.\u00a0I was really looking to do something else to it, and then I realized it was finished. There was nothing else to do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell me about the goldfish in A Room That Echoes<\/i>.<\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

You can\u2019t really paint goldfish without bringing up Matisse. Matisse owns goldfish, really. He kind of owns red, as well. It\u2019s very hard to think of red paintings without Matisse.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

He owns the color red and goldfish.<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

You know, Van Gogh has yellow. Matisse has red. Picasso has blue. But the goldfish, I think, poses an interesting problem for a painter\u2014how to represent things like water and glass. The fish was the ping of color that I felt the painting needed. In an abstract sense, I needed something to puncture that kind of atmosphere, the whole fog of the green. That thing became the goldfish.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you paint every day?<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

Most days. When the pandemic first was unfolding, we were very much in our routine of doing some homeschooling with Joseph, who\u2019s now thirteen, until maybe two o\u2019clock. Then we\u2019d both walk to the studio. We would get to the studio at two thirty, and then we\u2019d work until eleven, then eat, and then do the same thing all over again. That was a very interesting time, in a way, because of the space we went into in each day. I remember reading <\/span>As I Lay Dying<\/span><\/i> and being especially<\/span>\u00a0struck by the fact that\u2014maybe this was in the introduction\u2014Faulkner wrote that book in a six-week period when he was working a job, and the job was a night shift. He would finish at a certain point, midnight or something, and then go home and write from midnight till four or five in the morning, and then get up the next day. The book came out of that process and that space that you can find in a day.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

When you\u2019re doing other things, are you still thinking about painting?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes. It\u2019s a total curse. I had a tutor who used to say, in a mantra-like way, \u201cWhatever situation you\u2019re in, ask yourself, \u2018Is there a painting in this?\u2019\u201d I’ve really digested that advice. I\u2019ll be in a nightclub and still be thinking, Should I make this nightclub scene into a painting? People sometimes fetishize ideas, but often an idea comes out of just paying attention to a situation. Some part of me is always on the lookout for material I could use. One of the great subjects in painting is people sitting around\u2014bathers, or just people sitting on the grass.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Are there specific authors or works you revisit? Does your reading ever influence your work?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

Books are a huge influence. I\u2019m more a reader of poetry and of short stories than of novels. Winesburg,<\/i> Ohio<\/em>\u00a0by\u00a0Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce\u2019s Dubliners<\/i>, things like that\u2014little glimpses into things.\u00a0I get a lot from the poet W. S. Graham, who was a Scottish poet based in Cornwall for most of his life. He wrote quite a few poems about painting, and he had a real interest in vision. I like D. H. Lawrence\u2019s poems as well, and Seamus Heaney’s. I like how you can read a poem or a short story quite quickly, but digest it very slowly so that the aftereffects are lasting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Hue of an Orange<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>oil and varnish on hardback book cover, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/span>INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Is there a particular color that you end up using more than others? Do you have a favorite color that you find yourself sneaking into paintings?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014there 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\u2019s the reason, I don\u2019t know. Yellow\u2019s an interesting color psychologically as well. It can feel a bit sick and a bit ill sometimes, jaundiced or something. It\u2019s the color that is the most mysterious to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How many brushes do you have?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

A lot, but quite often I\u2019ll make a painting with just one brush. The painter Steven Campbell once gave me the critique, \u201cYou\u2019ve only got one brush.\u201d But I find if you use one brush, you are, in effect, putting some of the color all over the painting. It\u2019s a way of connecting bits of the painting. And using a terrible brush can force you to work in ways that make a more interesting painting. I sometimes look at a Rembrandt and see how he\u2019s done the hair, and it looks like he’s used the scruffiest old hardened brush, not his best brush. So I\u2019ve got certain brushes that I use all the time, but they\u2019re not good brushes.\u00a0You have to invent and to adjust to the tool, and it gives you something quite unexpected.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Andrew Cranston’s studio. Photograph courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What do you do for fun besides painting?<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I play a bit of golf. I think golf\u2019s quite different in other countries, but it’s still quite a working-class sport in Scotland and cuts across a lot of class structures. It\u2019s quite cheap, and it\u2019s very easy to get clubs at secondhand shops and thrift shops. I know Mark Twain said golf was a walk spoiled, but you are dealing with some construct of nature when you golf. Some of the Scottish courses are very wild. They\u2019ve not really been tamed or cultivated in the way that other courses in America have been. They tend to use the natural aspects of whatever the landscape\u2019s got: dunes along the coast or the woods. It\u2019s kind of like land art. Golf is land art on a large scale. <\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Can we expect some golfing to show up in your future paintings?<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s so uncool, golf. It does appeal to me in that sense. It\u2019s almost a taboo subject because it\u2019s so uncool. I’ve read that Samuel Beckett was a really big golfer, and I can see that there are slightly surreal qualities about golf. You\u2019re trying to get this ball in a tiny hole, and it\u2019s quite frustrating. There\u2019s something cartoon-like about it. I did do some golf paintings when I was younger.\u00a0I might do it. I might make another golf painting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How do you come up with the titles for your paintings? There\u2019s one that I love, and I love the painting: It Was Your Birthday (And a Seagull Shat on Your Head).<\/em><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

That happened to my partner, Lorna, on her birthday, so that is based on a real experience. I store up the titles. I have them all written down, and sometimes they happily match an idea or match an image. I write on the work as well. I write notes on the paintings, just loose notes about how the painting could go or what it could be about or things it reminds me of. They’re like little index cards or reminders to myself. It\u2019s so fleeting, sometimes, a painting. You forget what you\u2019re meant to be doing. The painting seems to vanish before your eyes. It\u2019s like Orpheus\u2014when he looks for his lover, she disappears.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

When Orpheus turns around.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

Yeah. It\u2019s a bit like that.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a great metaphor for painting.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

CRANSTON<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s always slightly out of reach.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photograph courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Na Kim is the art director of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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