Andrew Cranston

With these works, Scottish artist Andrew Cranston (born 1969) continues his exploration of how the world of painting, like the world of memory, leaks into the real. In these portraits of the artist's home city of Glasgow, figures and objects emerge, dissolve, reemerge and deliquesce. Working here in oil, varnish, acrylic and collage on a range of supports, Cranston responds to the "momentum" of a given composition even as he forms it. For the artist, assemblage is less a formal approach than a conceptual one, as he allows elements from sources across disciplines and time to seep in and inform one another. As he has himself stated, Cranston is interested in "how much the surface, the marks, start to fight the image. The tension you see between picture and painting. Between what it is and how it is."

Scottish painter Andrew Cranston (born 1969) creates transporting images that destabilize our sense of time: they invite the viewer to explore a space between nostalgia and the realm of the dream. Dense blots of oil graze on top of washes of distemper, guiding the viewer’s eye through thick and thin layers of pigment. The paintings gathered in Waiting for the Bell conjure a state of liminality—the feeling of being suspended in a dream before the alarm jolts one back to reality—and draw from stories, poems and experiences that emerge from the artist’s subconscious. Each painting’s layering is guided by intuition: a reference to a Carole King album cover is interlaced alongside allusions to jazz history, the writing of Muriel Spark and visions of the Scottish coast.

This substantial volume includes newly commissioned essays by Stephanie Burt and Barry Schwabsky.