Chardin might have been speaking for all painters when he said of
painting that, "it is an island whose shore I have skirted".
In a series of large abstract
paintings that emerge directly out of his two-year long investigation
of the landscape of Osea island Luke Elwes takes Chardin's evocative
metaphor and gives it shimmering new resonances. A few hours' drive
from London, Osea's wild, flat marshlands and empty, windswept skies
have become for the artist a point of departure and a place of return.
Dore Ashton wrote of Robert Motherwell, "He travels abroad
and in so doing returns to his own source."
For most of Luke Elwes'
artistic career he has travelled and painted. But he is no travel
painter. His extensive journeys, and through them his exposure to
the culture, beliefs, and landscape of others, 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 the artist's
decisive encounter with the desert at the start of the 1990s. After
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 Turkey - there is implicit
in the new work a sense of homecoming.
The artist's acute observation
of the physical world, his preoccupation with the flow of time and
matter as it is manifested on Osea, rewards us with canvases suffused
with ambient light and the colours of water where it breaks and
dissolves into earth.
The Osea paintings brim
with the luminous silence of an intimacy that approaches awe and
derives from a kind of looking that has been described as tenderness
towards experience. It is this quality of felt intimacy that draws
us so compelling into the paintings' sphere, holds and instructs
us there.
In the summer of 2002 Luke
will continue his investigation of islands when he visits a wild,
coniferous-forested granite island off Maine's rugged coast. Ospreys
are the guardians of this far-flung piece of wilderness. Osea and
Osprey Islands will both feature in Luke's first exhibition with
Art First New York in October 2002. CS
and FMD |