Artists inspired by domesticity, the magic in the mundane

‘There is a quieter tradition going on, different artists deciding there’s something really interesting in this room to paint, rather than outside of [it],’ says Scottish painter, Andrew Cranston. ‘Philosophically, you can only be in one place at a time, and we spend a lot of our lives in rooms, or in limited spaces. I think there’s a disease, a paranoia, that you’re missing out on something over the hill, or a party in the next room. It’s a simplistic thing but there’s some truth in it – it is almost like all the world’s problems stem from a person’s inability to be happy in their own room.’

Cranston, born in 1969 in Hawick, Scotland, and based in Glasgow, draws on an art education that concluded with postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Peter Doig, among others. He has been preoccupied with the magical ordinariness of interiors throughout his career, capturing everyday details – food strewn on a table, a quiet moment with the paper – in lusciously thick sweeps of oil paint. Cranston’s work, although firmly rooted in the real world, is nonetheless possessed of a dreamy, otherworldly quality that intersperses memories with mundane details.

‘The condition of a dream is something I can really draw into,’ says the artist. ‘It takes you away from a certain kind of logic, and gives you freedom, but I don’t see it as surrealist at all. It seems more of a concrete kind of fantasy, in the way in which dreams are a part of our everyday life. I do gravitate towards things that have a slightly other quality, where there’s a moment when something’s crystallised. It could be a strange light or atmosphere, or something which could only be described as dream-like. I’m not interested in drama. It’s that moment where there’s a certain feeling of stasis, that feeling that maybe something’s about to happen, or [has] just happened, but it’s not the event itself. If it was a film, you have to have those performances that don’t drive the story forward. They are seemingly unimportant, just little deviations from the story.’

By making the deviations from the story the story itself, Cranston is tapping into a long tradition of observing the unremarkable, a movement in art history that can be traced back to the 17th century and what is now termed the Dutch Golden Age. The period saw an extraordinary flourishing across art and science in the Netherlands, a movement that took shape in the work of artists, notably Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, and Frans Hals. They began to consider the realism of interiors as worthy subjects to paint alongside the more accepted biblical scenes and portraits. In the work of their contemporary, Judith Leyster – the majority of which was attributed to Hals until relatively recently – the emphasis on light and shadows inspired by Caravaggio lent a drama to domestic scenes.

It was a tradition that grew stronger over the subsequent centuries. Pierre Bonnard’s bold use of colour in his interiors led the drive into modernism, while in the 19th century, Édouard Vuillard challenged the Parisian stereotype of the domestic as a space reserved for the feminine. His claustrophobic, crowded interiors, juxtaposing patterns with flat planes of colour, bring a jarring realism to everyday scenes, surprisingly intimate in their faithful renderings.