One of the most special days of the summer was a visit to Andy Cranston's humming room of pictures at Ingleby.

Often filling much of the space with two or three colours of a close tonal value, the air in the described places is all consuming, and carries a feeling of thick murkiness or bright luminosity or a kind of static charge. The surfaces are full of minor incidents (narrative and painterly) - a ladder (described by painting up to its edges) lent against a garden wall [pic5], or a ribbon of tadpole-filled jam-jars [pic8] dividing the internal (classroom-like) space from the expansive forest outside and distant mountainscape.

For me, what I got the most excited about was the collection of floors throughout this show. From crazy paving to terrazzo to mosaic tiles to parquet… each solid surface, an infinity of cracks and crevices. These are sticky places for painting - the eye navigates their contours and networked webs with a sustained delight - as much for their painterly invention as for the sense that it is in the cracks that the stories lurk.

Andy’s paintings open themselves up slowly. They welcome you in unhesitatingly, but they withhold the keys to what’s going on for as long as possible. The pursuit of narrative sense (almost all of these pictures are without people) is constantly distracted by the perceptual transformation of colour, or the coalescing of forms. How paintings work - how they hold and release information - is of course analogous to good storytelling, and nobody quite holds the two objectives in such a reflexive bind as Andy.

A joy to see a room full of people celebrating Andy and his new work too.