Cranston’s work allows us to experience again the dynamic contradictions and tensions in the medium of painting—immediately familiar in its rich historicity, and refreshingly strange in his transformation of it.– Oli HazzardOur debut publication by Andrew Cranston pays tribute to a pocketbook the artist has carried with him for years: a slim but charming volume containing a collection of paintings and prints by Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee. This well-worn paperback, with its yellowed pages and gatefold images, has been a continued and convenient point of reference for Cranston, with the reproductions inside bearing a significant influence on many of the works included in 'What made you stop here?', the artist's first institutional solo show at The Hepworth Wakefield. As with the original titles of the Fontana Pocket Library of Great Art series to which the Klee book belongs, the object of this publication is to introduce the work of Andrew Cranston to the general reader at a price and in a format suitable to their pocket.In keeping with this model, Cranston's latest publication functions as an accessible entry point to his work, focusing on a rich selection of the artist's large-scale works, alongside several watercolours and a suite of new etchings. The book opens with an illuminating essay by Oli Hazzard, which grapples with all things Cranston: questions of perception, memory, and storytelling, all of which is controlled by an astonishing handling of colour, materiality, and composition. Each painting is presented alongside an accompanying interpretation by Liza Dimbleby—impressionistic passages of thoughtful wonder, imbued with formal curiosity and guided by years of friendship and conversation with the artist.“In earlier times," said Klee, in his Creative Credo (1920), “artists liked to show what was actually visible, either the things they liked to look at or things they would like to have seen. Nowadays we are concerned with reality rather than with the merely visible; we thereby express our belief that the visible realm is no more than a 'special case’ in relation to the cosmos, and that other truths potentially have greater weight." This little book shows some of the ‘other truths’ that Cranston has imaged: moments when whimsy, fantasy, automatism, distant memories, and an almost too-delicate sensitivity into focus via rare vistas of inner experience.Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969, and now lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Cranston studied at Gray’s School of Art, then completed his postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Peter Doig and Adrian Berg.Liza Dimbleby is an artist and writer. She has exhibited in London, Scotland and Paris, and published a book of writing and drawings about walking in cities, I Live Here Now. She lectures at art schools and universities in Scotland and England and teaches on the Drawing Year, a postgraduate programme at the Royal Drawing School, London.Oli Hazzard is the author of two books of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012) and Blotter (Carcanet, 2018), and a novel, Lorem Ipsum (Prototype, 2021). He teaches at the University of St Andrews and lives in Glasgow. Cacarnet will release Hazzard's third poetry collection, Sleepers Awake, in February 2024.
