FEATURES

This page features larger-scale projects upcoming and past

2025/2026

 

Traces.

(Please subscribe to this blog to stay updated on Traces as we develop the project towards public screening and exhibition)

This project comprises fourteen paintings by Rose Strang and a film documentary by Manuel Pennuto.

The paintings and film document a shared pilgrimage with Prof. Richard Demarco CBE., Terry Ann Newman (Deputy Director of the Demarco Trust), family and friends, to the ruins of a Carmelite Friary on the first of June in 2024. It was a day of luminous beauty and profound meaning; a challenging experience to transpose.

Within the ruined friary is a worn stone sculpture, the eight-hundred year old effigy of a crusade. It’s impossible to contemplate tsuch an image without considering the tragedy of ongoing war in the Middle East.  This was why I invited Richard Demarco to visit the friary. For most of his life Demarco has promoted culture as a means of healing dialogue between warring countries or ideologies. In 2002, for example, he was invited by Mercy Corps to curate an exhibition called Beyond Conflict – a response to hostility faced by ordinary Muslim people, following 9/11.

The Traces documentary records the challenges artists face when exploring contentious subject matter at a time when society appears fragmented, when truth is, at times, sacrificed to tribal beliefs.

An interview with Richard Demarco is central to the film, exploring themes of the project. As Richard explains himself, his physical reality at the age of 95 means he struggles to walk, so these paintings depict that frailty, so that viewers are invited to contemplate, along with us, why we choose to visit this particular site, and what we can learn from the past.

Film documentary trailer: Traces

All paintings from the series below …

Smaller preparatory works in the Luffness Series

 

 

2021 -2025

 

The Living Mountain

A stunning series of images – a symphony of subtle essences ***** Giles Sutherland The Times

In December 2020 I was commissioned by The Folio Society London to create a series of seven paintings to illustrate their new publication of Scotland’s iconic classic of landscape literature; The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, published by the Folio Society 2021

The series was on exhibition in 2023 at the following galleries …

The Scottish Poetry Library

The Heriot Gallery

The series will also be showing as part of The Braemar Literary Festival 2025.

Details Here

Watch video: The Living Mountain. Dreaming a Response

cover2

‘Among Elementals. Book cover. The Living Mountain Series. Oil on 60x42cm wood. Rose Strang 2020

2019

Planet Narnia – exhibition and event

Below; the Planets Series.

‘Venus (Planets Series)’. Mixed media on 30×30 inch panel. Rose Strang 2019
‘Planets Series. Jupiter’. Mixed media on 40×40″ wood panel. Rose Strang 2018
‘Mars. Planets Series’. Mixed media on 30×30″ wood. Rose Strang 2019.
‘Sun. Planets Series’. Mixed media on 30×30″ wood. Rose Strang 2019.
‘Mercury (Planets Series)’. Mixed media on 30×30 inch panel. Rose Strang 2019.
‘Moon (Planets Series)’. Mixed media on 30×30 inch panel. Rose Strang 2019.
‘Saturn. Planets Series’. Oil on 30×30″ panel. Rose Strang 2019.

Planet Narnia. The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis

The paintings above take inspiration from the planets as understood in Medieval cosmology and imagination, and the seven books of Narnia which were each inspired by the seven planets (as discovered by Michael Ward, author of  ‘Planet Narnia. The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis’.)

Exhibition and Talk at Demarco Galleries, Summerhall, Edinburgh 2019.

The paintings were exhibited at the Demarco Gallery, Summerhall, Edinburgh in September 2019, and the exhibition launch was accompanied by a talk by Michael Ward

More info about the exhibition: Planets Series

Below; photos of the related talk at the Demarco Galleries, Summerhall 2019