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."