Andrew Cranston: The Brodie Set

Andrew Cranston

The Brodie Set, 2016 - 2026

Etching on paper

Size: 30 x 24.5 cm

Edition of 40, signed and numbered

*As is traditional in editions publishing, prices will rise as an edition starts to sell out.

About the edition

For Glasgow International 2026, Andrew Cranston has created a special etching in an edition of 40. This edition is co-publish by Glasgow International and Glasgow Print Studio, with proceeds directly supporting both organisations.

Andrew Cranston’s edition relates to a 2016 series of prints made by the artist in response to the Scottish novel, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

“The truism that “the book is better than the film” (which I often dispute) is certainly true here. The book is great, the film not so great. Made on location in 1969, Edinburgh has never looked so bright and colourful, something that perturbed Spark when she saw it. It didn’t feel like the 1930s as she remembered it.

There is a scene in the film where Miss Brodie and her girls are on an outing to the museum on Chambers Street. As I watched it I started thinking of a scene they could have done using the fish that used to be in a tiled pond in the entrance hall.

So this image began life as a print, an etching. School girls looking at fish. A subject you might get in a Japanese print.

An image driven by shape. To me paintings must have a strong abstraction in them, however representational they might be. I hoped the dark shapes of fish would convey some sense of threat, of impending war, a game of battleships.” Andrew Cranston

About the artist

Andrew Cranston is a painter-storyteller, a way of working that is enhanced by his often painting on the linen bound covers of old books. His stories coalesce in the process of making - the paintings emerging gradually through the manipulation of his materials: layering, lacquering, bleaching, collaging and constantly re-working his way into images that seem to shift backwards and forwards in time. He has described one of his works as ‘a painting that came out of my brush one day’, a statement that sums up his approach. They are resolutely contemporary in spirit and yet connected by a strong thread to painters of the past, especially perhaps to the intimism of Vuillard and Bonnard, or to Matisse or Munch.

Cranston’s work is housed in collections around the world, including: TATE, London, UK; He Art Museum, Shunde, China; H+, Suzhou, China; Royal College of Art, London, UK; Unilever Collection, London, UK; Hawick Museum, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, UK; National Gallery of Scotland, UK; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Hall Art Foundation, Vermont, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA; Portland Art Museum, Oregon, USA and the Aishti Foundation, Beirut.