The Great Atlantic Map Works Gallery

Michael Strang’s professional painting career spans a period of 40 years from a painting of his mother dated 1968, before he went to art school, to a painting completed as I write this introduction in mid April 2009.

In a remarkable career that has produced literally thousands of oil paintings and drawings, Michael has embraced countless subjects within the spectrum of landscapes - natural and man-made, seascapes, floral arrangements, flowering fields and hedgerows, still-life and portraits.

At the latest count, his work has been shown in over 90 public and private galleries and museums, a total that includes the Tate St Ives, the Royal Academy, galleries in London’s Bond Street, Cork Street and Albermarle Street and, famously, The Gallery at Virginia Water.

As well as in private collections all over the world, Michael Strang paintings may be found in notable public collections, including Penlee House, Penzance; Falmouth Art Gallery; Cornwall County Council; St Martin’s in the Fields, London; and Surrey University. And he has donated many works to help raise funds for a range of charities and restoration funds.

Michael is a passionate and energetic painter for whom no day is complete without the application of paint to canvas or panel. He shares his time between West Cornwall, Surrey and Wales.

Artist’s Comment

“Before commencing Art School in 1968, I read that Turner had wanted to bequeath a large amount of work painted at different points in his life, to the nation, on condition that they were shown together. I can remember thinking that surely the later pictures would be better images and that the earlier ones should be more or less banished in favour of the more recent.

“Of course, now with over 40 years of painting behind me, I have revisited that view and realise the excitement of being able to see the “oeuvre” of an artist as a totality, each work though perhaps years apart, in dialogue with the others - jostling, correcting, arguing, debating, counterbalancing its neighbours. Extrapolating from this, the work then continues its dialogue with the paintings created during further years by earlier artists that have excited and inspired the present collection, thus setting in motion a train of thinking that echoes Elliot’s words in his ‘Tradition and the industrial talent’ – ‘..no poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is his appreciation of his relation to dead poets and artists’ ”.

“Thus [my] paintings ……… form in part, the tree of my artistic journey though its roots dig and burrow into the wealth of our culture’s history, gaining inspiration and sustenance from the painters, poets, writers and composers who have gone before and whose creative achievements stand as an eternal testimony to the indomitable spirit of mankind.”