Luke Elwes is a painter whose journeys have exposed him to the culture, beliefs and landscapes of others, and have acted as a catalyst for his own line of enquiry into the nature of our relationship to the world. This exploration can be traced back to his childhood in Persia and to his first significant encounter with the desert at the start of the 1990s.

There followed a decade of journeys to distant parts of the world, the central Australian desert, East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, New Mexico, Mount Kailash in Tibet and Cappadocia in Asia Minor. Since 2001 he has also worked for extended periods on an island off the east coast of England.

His paintings are a response to the spirit of these places and are infused with the passage of time and the often hidden marks of an ancient history. They are characterized by rivers, circles, crosses and tracks that hover between earth and sky, the surfaces of which have been described by Andrew Lambirth as ‘distressed palimpsests’.

‘His work continues to offer a poetic mixture of exploration and meditation, a journey intent on mapping a path that is both internal and external.’ (Art First New York 2002)

Luke Elwes was born in 1961. He studied history and history of art at university before going on to Camberwell school of Art, and since 1990 he has had solo exhibitions in London, Paris and New York. He also writes about contemporary art for journals including Modern Painters, Royal Academy Magazine and Galleries Magazine.

View Luke’s weblog here