All the world is green

Worlds wait inside the covers of books: stories, histories, fables. In Andrew Cranston’s small book cover paintings, worlds also emerge on them. The Glasgow-based painter, who is also represented in the Art Gallery’s collection by the larger painting 'Moth' 2021, has painted many works on the covers of old books, using their frayed and irregular surfaces as a prompt for paintings that themselves record the passage of time, the play of light, and the accumulation of memory in landscapes and interiors well known to the artist. As well as inducing an intimate physical focus in viewers, who must lean close to absorb the details of such works, the abraded surfaces and glowing colour in these paintings also calls to mind older forms of contemplative art, among them illuminated manuscripts, medieval books of hours, and portable devotional paintings. 'All the world is green', which was first seen in Cranston’s acclaimed 2023 exhibition 'Never a joiner' at Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, is a particularly tender and radiant example of Cranston’s collaborations with ‘second-hand’ surfaces. In the mottled textures of a hardback book cover, Cranston blots in the darkness of an attic room in his home – a darkness burst into by the green that fills his window view, as he has noted, for a third of each year. The sunlight beyond the trees arrives in the room as a halo around the head of the flower, which assumes the presence of an attentive living figure in this work, looking outward at the view. Other presences are felt in the picture; the chair awaits its occupant and steam seems to rise from a vessel on the table. Under the table, meanwhile, an untouched area of the cover becomes a Bonnard-like cat that appears to be stretching awake. Cranston’s subtle coaxing of detail from the textures of an aged book cover suggests that this small world, rather than being imposed on the object, lay waiting to be found within it. Cranston writes of this work:

"It's pretty much the view I wake up to: an arched window looking onto a wall of lime trees, densely green for a third of the year. I see it, framing it, recording it, squinting my eyes to simplify it and understand the tone/colour relationship. Our walls are light but the walls of this book gave me a dark and dilapidated patina. We're up in the sky amongst the trees, and squirrels and birds are directly across from us, all of us looking for some privacy. At night I've seen the hunched dark shapes of pigeons on a branch, seemingly asleep. Once I saw and heard a woodpecker.

It's an attic room that reminds me of a particular Gwen John painting.

It's an old book, I forget the title - Wilson's Tales of the Borders? Or maybe it was a Bible? It acts as a Rorschach test. I see things in it.

A blast of framed green, positioned centrally which was helped along by a indentation, a sort of decorative crest.

Working on the dark red/brown ground of a book this image slowly emerged. Dark grounds give you a kind of dream space to invent and imagine.

It's a dark like the darkness of a very old cave, and what you find in there is something to do with you."