Tag Archives: Scottish artists

Iona Sea and new exhibitions in 2025

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Above: North Beach Iona, May. Oil on 30×20 inch linen canvas. Rose Strang 2025

Lots of exciting new projects coming up!

The painting above is one of a series I’m creating for the Graystone Gallery, Edinburgh for their Edinburgh Festival exhibition, which launches on Saturday July 19th from 1 to 3pm

The painting below is for the Limetree Gallery‘s upcoming Summer Exhibition which launches 3rd July. You can preview or reserve paintings now by contacting them on their website.

(If you’re interested in buying or reserving one of the paintings please contact the galleries direct on the links in the above paragraph, thank you).

I have another three at larger sizes for the Graystone coming up. Readers of the blog will know how much Iona means to me, and to thousands of other people who visit the island every year. It’s a special place I’ve been visiting now for about thirty four years and I’d say it’s one of my biggest inspirations as an artist.

The next larger paintings will be a bit more abstract, but I know that people find these paintings of turquoise sparkling water joyful, and so do I!

This series is doubly special since my partner Adam and I prepared the canvases ourselves with sretcher bars and raw linen.

I’ve kept the lovely texture and colour of the linen by using clear gesso. If you look at the close ups of ‘Sea Light, Iona’ and ‘Iona North Beach, May’ below, you can see the unpainted canvas …

More soon …

Seascapes

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Above: Sea Triptych. Oil on three 33×22 inch wood panels.

Below, some smaller works in this new seascapes series –

This series is part-inspired by the Aberlady landscape – which has been a focus this year in most of my paintings.

This style of painting feels very natural and comes easily to me, but I’m still working on expression of the Luffness woods and Carmelite Friary (in Aberlady theme). Sometimes there are too many ideas and it’s better to simply paint instinctively for a while until something more unified swims into focus.

The upshot is that I’ll return to that theme after a brief hiatus into my ‘default mode’ of moody seascapes!

More details soon …

Maspie Waterfall

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Above – Maspie Waterfall. Acrylic on 17 by 16 inch wood panel.

A semi-abstract painting of layered acrylic depicting Maspie waterfall in Autumn.

Maspie Burn winds its way from the Lomond Hills in Fife down to the beautiful little town of Falkland. It’s a quiet place, best known for Falkland Palace – a favourite dwelling place of Mary Queen of Scots. There have been settlements here going back into the mists of time, or pre-history to precise. If you keep walking up to the source of Maspie Burn, you’ll eventually encounter earthworks named Maiden Castle, which show the remains of an ancient fort.

Falkland recently became better known as ‘Inverness’ in the tv series Outlander – it’s very much cuter than Inverness mind you, inverness having become a small but busy city. Photo below, me posing in Falkland, ala ‘Claire’, looking quite a bit sturdier and shorter than the model-esque Caitriona Balfe!)

I left the painting fairly abstract as it captures the energy of Autumn without going too pretty. The wood was actually part of a series of old cupboards from a flat owned by some friends of ours. Knowing I usually paint on wood, they asked if I’d like use it for painting. Yes indeed! I like re-using stuff.

Some photos of Falkland and a photo from our walk this weekend at Maspie Waterfall, you can walk behind it!

Autumn Exhibition

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Above – Aberlady Shorelines III. Oil on 8×5.5 inch wood in oak frame. Rose Strang 2024

I’m delighted to be exhibiting these small oil sketches, framed in oak, at The Limetree Gallery this October. If you’re interested in the paintings, or would like to reserve one, please contact the gallery for details.

The Limetree Autumn Exhibition launches on the 24th October at Limetree Gallery, Bristol

Here are a few photos I took with my mobile today, showing these lovely oak frames, then below those – at the end of this post – are more detailed photos of all the paintings available for the Autumn Exibition at the Limetree Gallery, with titles and sizes.

These paintings represent the start of my Aberlady-inspired series this year. They were quick oil sketches designed to capture the atmospheric solitude and moody colours of the east coast in winter, such a contrast to my later paintings of Aberlady in June this year! More on that tomorrow…

In the meantime, here are all the paintings, below, which will be on exhibition at The Limetree Gallery, Bristol. As mentioned,please contact the gallery if you’d like to reserve any of these paintings before they go on exhibition 24th October this year…

An exciting new project …

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Above – a still from the upcoming documentary –

A moving, intimate insight into what makes an artist paint. This short documentary by filmmaker Manuel Pennuto is abuzz with love, capturing the enchantment of nature. While exploring the insecurities of creativity, it captures the fact that creativity is surely transformative.

I’m pretty excited about this documentary! As described above, it’s not simply about my personal creative process, it’s about everything and everyone that makes a creative project come to life and selling paintings is just one small aspect of what makes artists paint.

Manuel has kindly offered a short taster of what’s to come in the clip below. It’s not a trailer as yet, but I think it gives a sense of the ideas in his documentary …

Forest of Luffness, painting progress 3

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Above Forest of Luffness 4. Oil on 14×14 inch wood. Rose Strang 2024

Today’s painting (from a series in progress inspired by the presence and history of a Carmelite Friary in the forest of Luffness) features my neice holding her new born baby, standing within the Friary.

I wanted to capture the sense of strength and protection that a young mother exudes, then the style of painting changed slightly and became a bit more contemporary. Probably something to do with Emma’s outfit which was quite contemporary.

I like this as a smaller study in the series. (All four paintings from this particular summer series below). I’ve been exploring the theme of the Carmelite Friary in Luffness since January, but each set of paintings is distinct to each season.

‘The Path’

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The painting above The Path. Water mixable oil on 14 by 14 inch wood, depicts a meaningful walk (with Richard Demarco and Terry Ann Newman) towards the 12th century Friary ruins at Luffness recently.

More on that in this post – Dappled things

Some painting details …

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A beautiful place …

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Above: Beauly substation.

What you see above is a view of the gravel quarry and SSEN (Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks) electricity substation near Beauly, Inverness-shire.

Beauly means ‘a beautiful place’ and despite these developments by SSEN, much of it still is. We were walking there again last weekend as part of a visit to the Kilmorack Gallery (showing the excellent exhibition Borrowed Land until 2nd March)

For perspective, here’s an old map of the area contrasted with a current view …

It’s pretty disheartening isn’t it? Imagine if you lived here though, and your favourite walk, through landscape like this (my photos of Beauly taken last weekend and last November) …

Was replaced with this …

The site includes numerous important archeological remains and the developments have obviously caused utter devastation to local wildlife.

SSEN (Scottish and Southern Electric Network) plan to extend their transmission line, create more wind farms and, the site at Beauly is to be extended from 60 acres to 860 acres, which is just huge.

Even worse, this is intended for areas across the Scottish Highlands …

Beauly-Power-Lines-map.jpg_49966326-1tm1z5xtl-542x564

Some might consider this the inevitable price of progress, but it’s not progress, and nor is it needed – which becomes very evident when you look into current and future energy requirements for Scotland and the UK. As usual, quite simply it’s a money-making excercise for global companies, supported and encouraged by our own government.

I’ll include more information about SSEN’s proposals ongoing, but I’m new to this and  you’ll be better informed about these developments and possible ways to help by joining this facebook page…

Communities Before Power Companies

It’s run by people who live in these areas who’ve been resisting such developments for years. If/when you join, invite all your contacts and remember that this affects us all -you might not be able to attend local meetings, but you can sign petitions, write to MP’s and share information.

Lastly, here are two excellent letters/articles published by the Press and Journal (by two admins for Communities Before Power Companies) Elaine Ritter and Denise Davis …

 
 
 

More oil sketches …

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Above: Shorelines, Aberlady. I. Oil on 8×5.5″ wood. Rose Strang 2024

More oil sketches in progress today inspired by the shorelines and moods of Aberlady…

For my experimental paintings and ideas I’ve been working at this size for some time and it really works for me in terms of loose brushwork. It would be a bit of a nightmare to work at a larger size with this more experimental messy approach – that would be a lot of oil paint going to waste when it doesn’t work (which is often!) and a lot of physical energy and time expended.

It’s been a while since I posted a video of my working process. I’m very forgetful of such things but people seem to enjoy them, so one of those coming up soon.

I’m also still working on my Carmelite monastery and Crusader’s tomb series (see older posts) which are very different in feel to these smaller landscape paintings. I love the freedom of my smaller landscape paintings, but I think I have something more to say as an artist so I’ll be persevering with that series over the coming weeks. It’s important to get out of my comfort zone and dig a bit deeper …

Oil sketches …

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Above: Aberlefdi. Winter I. Oil on 8×5.5″ wood. Rose Strang 2024

These are some oil sketches I’ve been working on as part of a general series this year which explores the history and landscape of Aberlady in the south of Scotland.

Part of the series is a deeper look at the the history of a Carmelite monastery near Aberlady, but the paintings also reflect my love of a landscape that’s deeply familar to me.

I think there’s something dreamlike about Aberlady. It might be the sheer sense of space in sky, sand and sea, but I think it’s also something I find in particular on the east coast of Scotland. Looking out to the north sea towards Norway and Denmark, there’s something haunting about the fact that about 8000 years ago we’d have been looking at Doggerland, before the series of great landslides called the Storegga Slides occurred, creating the north sea. It looks and feels very different to the soft light of the west coast of Scotland.

Whenever I look at paths or horizons in this landscape, I also think of journeys, and the fact that not so long ago in the days when Aberlady was called Aberlefdi (hence the title of this series of small landscapes) it was an important stop on the pilgrim route between the Isle of Iona and Lindisfarne, or Holy Isle as it’s also known. That was in around 700AD when one of St Columba’s followers called St Aiden was tasked with setting up a new monastery on Lindisfarne.

When you camp over night near Aberlady you experience all the moods of the seasons; the burnished gold of marram grass and sand in winter, the soft green of the sea and grass in June when the larks and rabbits are at their busiest, or the thunder, lightning and rainstorms on humid late summer nights.