Self-Portrait With the Combat Nymphos Of Saigon | Chris Cran | Oil and acrylic on canvas | 54.5" x 84" | 1985
Chris Cran, my father-in-law, and one of Canada's most celebrated artists, has launched a new website featuring his work in painting from the early 80's up until the present day.
Wavelength of Speech, Hap Tivey (2007)
My brother-in-law, Anthony Cran, and his wife Naomi Wilding, have recently opened Wilding Cran, a Los Angeles based gallery representing international contemporary artists.
Chris Cran, Family (1987). Oil on canvas
My father-in-law, Chris Cran, is included in BUILDERS, the Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada.
Peter Boyd is an awesome guy, an art collector, and now he makes wine. Marsha Lederman profiles the him in the Globe and Mail:
An art collection that pays homage to artists connected to the Canadian West
As soon as he left the University of Western Ontario and landed a job, Peter Boyd bought a car, some furniture and his first work of art.
He has since spent “hundreds of thousands” of dollars on his art habit, running out of wall space at home and keeping much of his collection in storage (necessitated, in part, by the 2009 sale of his oil-field seismic-services company Arcis Corp., and the subsequent disappearance of office walls on which to hang the work).
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Influenced by childhood trips to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., he began his collection with historical work by artists such as David Milne, but has sold or gifted most of it and now exclusively collects contemporary art. His collection of about 100 works (it peaked at about 200) is populated with artists connected to the Canadian West, including Chris Cran, Douglas Coupland, Attila Richard Lukacs and Geoffrey James, but he also owns work by Robert Mapplethorpe and Eric Fischl. “You’re always falling in love with art if you love art,” he says.
His latest entrepreneurial venture is Genius Wines; its first release a pricey Sonoma County cabernet sauvignon he calls Creo. “It comes from the Latin word for creativity,” he says. “It’s my tribute to artists who are geniuses.”
Chris Cran is in the latest issue of Adbusters.
What One Artist Just Felt Like Doing One Day
by: Gary Michael Dault
I ask painter Chris Cran - whose shimmering, graphically delicate but exacting paintings deal with a myriad of subtle optical issues - if he thinks of himself as a visual satirist? I figure all that allusiveness in his pictures - to optical art, to pop art, to photography, to portraiture - pegs him not only as a virtuoso manipulator of genres, but as their gleeful analyst and demystifier.
He doesn’t deny it exactly, but points out, with a certain Cran-ish wryness, on the phone from his studio in Calgary, that “there’s the pleasure of them too.” For a painter whose work seems so elaborately planned and carefully worked up, it’s disarming to hear him stress that part of his practice “is simply asking myself what I feel like doing today.”
Self Portrait with the Combat Nymphos of Saigon | Chris Cran (1985)
Chris Cran is brilliant and hilarious and dangerous. One of my new favorite people.