Tag Archives: artist

Forest of Luffness, painting progress 5

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Above and directly below: First of June. Luffness 2. Oil on 12 x 12 inch canvas. Rose Strang 2024

This is the second smaller work in a series exploring a day in June among the ruins of a Carmelite Friary. If you follow this blog you’ll know I’ve been exploring this theme from the start of the year and it’s been an interesting time…

Because I share a bit about my own creative process, it’s all hanging out there for everyone to observe how difficult it is to find the right way to approach a complicated subject!

I began with the idea of exploring a war-traumatised psyche – a dreamlike series exploring archetypal and abstract imagery. It produced these paintings below, quite different from my usual approach. It didn’t come easily but it was interesting as creative exploration.

This was followed by an attempt to depict the atmosphere of the small forest at Luffness, and the strangely affecting presence of an aged effigy depicting a 12th century crusader – almost worn to nothing. Mostly I was just trying to loosen up and find a way forward through a complicated subject – I’m an instinctive painter and although my mind is constantly active, I just can’t paint from a strategic cerebral perspective because my thoughts are rarely conclusive.

It was at this stage that a few people questioned the themes of my work, which brought me to a temporary grinding halt – a good thing since it made me think more deeply about the themes and where I stand regarding subjects such as faith, Christianity and war.

That experience was followed by a day which has now become the title of this series: The first of June in Luffness. There’s no way to summarise that day because so many aspects of it are ongoing parts of life. There’s no conclusion to my relationships to family and friends, the exploration of faith and spirituality, the exploration of art, or the response to violence and war. There’s just the fact that these things exist, ongoing.

I remember back in art college, when we were being taught about post-modernism, we were told that nothing is real, all is subjective. At the time, a good friend said ‘but suffering is real’, meaning that is surely something we can all agree on – an objective truth even though suffering has degrees of difference. How we respond to that is the question. Maybe one of the most useful books for me in recent years has been C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man – all about the concept of objectivity. It’s not an argument for religion or Christianity, it’s a philosophical work which looks at the concept of objectivity and ethics in cultures worldwide. Is there such a thing as a set of objective ideals we all understand to be true?

I’ve always liked Beckett’s lines:

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.

I won’t pander to louts is the upshot of all this! Anyway, in these latest paintings I think I’ve found a way to explore the themes. More on this later.

Start to the year …

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Above Aberlady Sketches 1. Oil on 5×7″ wood. Rose Strang 2024

A start to the year and a new project with this small, twilit painting of Aberlady.

It’s a project a long time in waiting. I was beginning to explore ideas back in early 2020 when the obvious event struck, causing a small panic about income, but then three painting commissions came at me from out of the blue and I’ve been busy ever since it seems.

The Village of Aberlady is not a place you’d describe as mysterious or dramatic, unless you knew it well. The first impression is of a very pretty, conventional village, perfect for the rich retirees. A train used to stop here but the railway was dismantled in the 1970’s. There are one or two shops, a couple of inns and a takeaway.

Aberlady Main Street

So why am I so obsessed with painting a series about my response to this place? Well, I’ll be painting and writing about ‘why’ for the rest of 2024!

The most obvious appeal, beyond the village itself, is of course the nature reserve that stretches across a mile or two of grassland and dunes to an expanse of glittering sand reaching far out to sea at low tide. It’s one of the very few places I’ll swim in Scotland. In August when the sea has become less cold and has flowed back in across the warm sand, bathing here in shallow water is almost bath-like. Plus there’s hardly anyone around since, compared to the amount of people at North Berwick further south along the coast, relatively few will walk the two miles to the sea. There are of course hundreds and thousands of birds, and deer, rabbits galore and any amount of other species I don’t know about.

Aberlady November 2016
Aberlady September 2021
Aberlady, June 2017
Aberlady August 2020

The appeal for most people visiting Aberlady these days is peace in nature. One thing that fascinates me though is the way places change in importance over several hundred years, depending on their function. Think of St Andrews in Fife, it was the ecclesiastical centre of Scotland hunreds of years ago. Now it’s known as the home of Scotland’s oldest university, and for its golf course. (also made more famous by the royal romance I suppose. I was attending post graduate art studies there at the same time as Will and Kate but never bumped into them, not quite moving in the same circles!) Or think of York, known now for its olde worlde timber-framed buildings and awe-inspiring York Minster – when in the past it was the centre of power in England.

Going farther back in time, Aberlady was a place that had to defend itself from violent attack, and going even further back to  the 7th century it was the last stop for pilgrims on their way from Iona to Lindisfarne.

iona3

Beneath its pleasant exterior I find Aberlady to be a place of deep mystery and drama. It’s something you can’t see, but rather it’s something you feel after years of immersing yourself in its landscape and history.

Hence why I’ll be working towards a series of paintings this year to explore my fascination with Aberlefdi, as it was originally named – a mixture of Pictish aber meaning river mouth and Lef, the name of a Viking warrior whose remains are interred beneath Luffness House in Aberlady Bay. That’s just one little detail in the whole story though.

More to follow in the coming weeks as the light improves and I can really get into painting this series …

One of my Aberlady paintings from 2020: