Andrew Cranston Ordinary Things that Glow

“I’m a quick worker and a slow thinker,” Andrew Cranston told me in his Glasgow studio. The evidence of this was all around us. It looked as though a tornado had whipped through an over-filled second-hand bookstore; or someone had gone mad searching for a lost cryptocurrency key, checking between every page of every book before discarding them in piles on the floor.

That was almost three years ago, and I was about to return to Australia, not knowing how much all our lives were going to change in the intervening period. And this studio visit in itself was full of surprises. I’d come to look at his exquisite, tiny artworks – each painted on the cover of an old, usually hardback, book (many years ago he would paint on favourite album covers. His taste in music, unusually, moved backwards in time, he told me, “from punk to progressive – starting with The Smiths and The Cure”). His