Art is first of all a question of private passions, passions that only finally, connect with a wider audience through the sensuous instincts of the artist. For Luke Elwes, over the last decade, that obsession has been with the sacred landscape. His journeys to the dry tablelands of the Hopi Indians in New Mexico, the Central Australian Desert of the Australian Aborigines, the Great Rift Valley in East Africa (the first landscape consciously known to human eyes) and, more recently, to the Buddhist sacred mountain, Mt. Kailash in the Tibetan Plateau, are all part of an intense need to confront and give form to the inner loneliness of our existence - those same "desert places" that so haunted the imagination of the poet Robert Frost. And, on each of these journeys it has been the quietness and steadiness of his attention to the landscape, his willingness to let the complex language of the land shape his experience of it, that has resulted in such a consistently rich and rewarding body of paintings over this period.