Chris Cran (born 1949 in Ocean Falls, British Columbia) is a Canadian visual artist, based in Calgary, Alberta. Cran's work "investigates perception and illusion, and the viewer’s role in how images are formed...Widely exhibited across Canada and internationally recognized, Cran has become known for turning nothing into something, with the slightest push. Cran’s paintings, included in numerous Canadian collections, have to do with visual tricks, images that appear one way but have been made another way." He has been described in The New York Times as a painter who "…has built a career on tampering with people’s perceptions." In an article published in Galleries West, Jeffrey Spalding, who was senior curator at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, described the 2015–2016 multi-partner major survey of Cran's work at the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG), Lethbridge, Alberta as a "remarkable and unique career milestone" with exhibition organizers describing Cran as "influential" and "one of the country’s most notable painters of the last few decades." Education and artistic influences Cran studied at the Kootenay School of Art, Nelson, B.C. and Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) (Honours painting, 1979). In 1978 Cran attended a lecture in Edmonton by renowned then-74-year-old American art critic Clement Greenberg (1904–1994) – one of a series Greenberg presented in that city. Cran was provoked and irritated by Greenberg's already outdated dogma. Greenberg had held such sway in Canada as well as the United States and was considered by some to be one of the most renowned art critics in American history. Critics such as Leo Steinberg and others argued that Greenberg dealt more with what artists and curators could not do, such as contextualize an art object and glorify kitsch. Cran was of the next generation of artists who embraced post-modernity and Greenberg's ideas were entrenched in modernity. Work In a 2003 review published in Canadian Art Magazine, Calgary Herald art critic Nancy Tousley compared Cran's creative process to meteorological events, storms, showers and "thunderous, lightning speed one offs" in which he produces experimental works based on an idea as catalyst using a handful of different styles. The result is a body of work that looks like it was not produced by one artist but many. In his review of Cran's 2009 exhibition entitled Bright Spiral Standard at Toronto's Clint Roenisch Gallery, The