Andrew Cranston (b. 1969, Hawick), studied at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen and then earned a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London where Peter Doig and Adrian Berg were his tutors. He returned to Gray's to lecture between 1997 and 2017 and is represented by Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh and Karma in New York. In 2014, he was awarded the Arts Foundation fellowship by the Royal Scottish Academy.
Cranston's work depicts dream-like worlds based on liminal spaces, typically in domestic environments. His narrative vignettes draw on personal history as well as artistic and anecdotal sources. Through layers of luminous paint and ruminative imagery, his darkly humorous compositions recall Post-Impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. He works on multiple pieces at the same time, with the finished images gradually emerging through the manipulation and re-working of materials: layering, lacquering, bleaching, collaging. He described one of his works as 'a painting that came out of my brush one day', a statement that sums up his approach.
