Barbara Rae became a Dame for her services to art in the 2025 New Year Honours list. A prominent Scottish artist, Rae works in both painting and printmaking and is a member of both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy. This Damehood makes Rae the only living Scottish female artist currently holding this title.
Rae was born in Falkirk and studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1961 to 1965. After graduation, she travelled to France and Spain on a travelling scholarship, which sparked a lifelong interest in travel and exploration. Today, she continues to take inspiration from new places, landscapes and cultures. Rae has travelled widely in search of this inspiration, exploring far-flung locations including Europe, the Arctic, the Antarctic and the United States. However, she also continues to draw inspiration from landscapes closer to home, including the West Coast of Scotland and the Lammermuir Hills.
Rather than producing literal representations of the landscape around her, Rae instead abstracts these environments. She has stated that she is ‘not much interested in topography – the history of the landscape and the people that shaped it are the attraction.’ Her paintings subtly allude to geological formations through layered compositions of line, colour and texture. A defining feature of Rae’s work is her experimental approach to materials and surface. She often combines oil, acrylic, pastel and collage within a single piece, for example in her work Southern Door. In the work Inishkeas, she layers different materials onto the canvas, building up the surface to create a sense of erosion and history that mirrors the weathered Irish landscape that inspired it. Printmaking also plays a significant role in her oeuvre and her print works echo her painterly practice, exploring layering and texture.
Colour in Rae’s practice is expressive rather than descriptive. She uses earthy hues, deep blues, chalky whites and flashes of intense red or orange to convey atmosphere and emotion. These bright, bold colours can be seen in Red, Downpatrick. While such vibrant colours might not typically be associated with natural landscapes, they evoke the essence of a rugged, wild and ever-changing environment.
Overall, Dame Barbara Rae’s practice is characterised by an ongoing dialogue between place and abstraction. Her work does not simply depict landscape, rather it embodies it, capturing its history, people and material through richly worked surfaces and dynamic compositional structures.
