Andrew Cranston, ‘I'm going in a field’

Modern Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Andrew Cranston, I’m going in a field , the artist’s third presentation with the gallery. Andrew Cranston’s latest body of work extends his attentive inquiry into where painting and memory coexist, where the intimacies of life are found in the small things of the world. Often dreamlike, as if records of an elusive remembering, Cranston’s paintings compellingly move through the quieter margins of art history. As he notes: ‘For me painting is a medium of stasis and silence, and there’s sometimes an interesting awkward relationship with the world that moves and makes sound. This tension of stopping the flow of time and condensing it.’ No lines allowed , 2026 The exhibition takes its title from a 1976 song by the Scottish poet Ivor Cutler. The wistful, repeated phrase ‘I’m going in a field’ becomes a small declaration of withdrawal from the structures of everyday life, joined by other modest gestures – lying down, gazing at a yellow flower. Here, the field appears as common ground, it is also the space where an isolated, hushed tension of concentration might occur – much like time spent painting in the studio – one situated at the quizzical point between stillness and action. For Cranston, this pause is redolent of the moment when a player, such as during a tennis match or round of golf, takes a breath before hitting the ball; a pause that not only arrests the body temporally but also spatially, charging the field, court or terrain with the imprint of events that resonate even when dormant or empty. In a painting of a squash court, Cranston returns to the motif of the grid. Indelibly linked to modernist ideals, of geometries that exceed and collapse the frame of the canvas, the grid here becomes dense and tactile. The scored surface acts as a physical boundary between the two competing figures, enclosing them in a space that is as much quotidian as it is compositionally isolating. A regular writer, list maker and note taker, Cranston accompanies each painting with thoughts and digressions, these include biographical details such as his interest in football, rugby, tennis and golf – fascinations bound up with cultural and national narratives rooted in his upbringing in the small town of Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Cranston has likened I’m going in a field to an album by a musician; a sequence of images held in concert with previous works, from those formed from his own memories to those found in the pages of a book or elsewhere – a sleight of hand that enables the past and present, the affectionate and the cosmic, to appear in the seemingly fixed frame of a painting. As he once wrote, ‘I am led here by a fight with visibility, a game of making things seen, barely seen’.