115 x 170mm, 112 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

With texts by Liza Dimbleby and Oli Hazzard

Our debut publication by Andrew Cranston pays tribute to a pocketbook the artist has carried with him for years: a slim but charming volume containing a collection of paintings and prints by Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee. This well-worn paperback, with its yellowed pages and gatefold images, has been a continued and convenient point of reference for Cranston, with the reproductions inside bearing a significant influence on many of the works included in 'What made you stop here?', the artist's first institutional solo show at The Hepworth Wakefield. As with the original titles of the Fontana Pocket Library of Great Art series to which the Klee book belongs, the object of this publication is to introduce the work of Andrew Cranston to the general reader at a price and in a format suitable to their pocket.

In keeping with this model, Cranston's latest publication functions as an accessible entry point to his work, focusing on a rich selection of the artist's large-scale works, alongside several watercolours and a suite of new etchings. The book opens with an illuminating essay by Oli Hazzard, which grapples with all things Cranston: questions of perception, memory, and storytelling, all of which is controlled by an astonishing handling of colour, materiality, and composition. Each painting is presented alongside an accompanying interpretation by Liza Dimbleby impressionistic passages of thoughtful wonder, imbued with formal curiosity and guided by years of friendship and conversation with the artist.

In earlier times, said Klee, in his Creative Credo (1920), artists liked to show what was actually visible, either the things they liked to look at or things they would like to have seen. Nowadays we are concerned with reality rather than with the merely visible; we thereby express our belief that the visible realm is no more than a 'special case in relation to the cosmos, and that other truths potentially have greater weight. This little book shows some of the ‘other truths that Cranston has imaged: moments when whimsy, fantasy, automatism, distant memories, and an almost too-delicate sensitivity into focus via rare vistas of inner experience.

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