Andrew Cranston valuation
Paints small, storytelling pictures on the cloth covers of old hardback books.
Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969 and lives and works in Glasgow.
What a work by Andrew Cranston is worth
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Bio
Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969 and lives and works in Glasgow. He studied at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen and then at the Royal College of Art in London. Much of his work is painted on the linen covers of old books — small, intimate interiors and remembered scenes built up through layering, sanding and reworking — alongside larger canvases of the same half-remembered, anecdotal kind.
Both the book-cover paintings and the larger canvases come to market, and they are distinct categories: the covers are small and numerous, the canvases fewer. Subjects recur, so title, date and dimensions matched to the gallery's records are what identify a work. The book covers are unusual supports — cloth over board, sometimes with the book still attached — so the condition of the cover, the spine and any lifting of the paint needs checking, and they should be handled as objects rather than as flat panels.
Gray's, the Royal College and rooms from books
Before Gray's he took a diploma at Manchester Polytechnic, and at the Royal College of Art his tutors included Peter Doig and Adrian Berg. In 1993 he won the NatWest Prize for Art and the John Kinross Travelling Scholarship. He went back to Gray's to teach painting from 1997 until 2017, and in 2014 the Royal Scottish Academy gave him an Arts Foundation fellowship.
A recurring subject is a room described in a book: Illustration for a Franz Kafka story (2nd version), of 2007, paints Gregor Samsa's bedroom from Metamorphosis. In 2018 the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh showed But the dream had no sound, a series of paintings on hardback book covers that The Scotsman compared with Bonnard and Vuillard. He is represented by Ingleby in Edinburgh, Modern Art in London and Paris, and Karma in New York.
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