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For most of Luke's artistic career he has travelled and painted. His extensive journeys have exposed him to cultures, beliefs and landscapes other than his own, 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 Osea, an island off the East Coast of England, a few hours drive from London.
Luke Elwes is by no means a travel painter. 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. His subjects lend themselves beautifully to his way of handling paint, with characteristic thin luminous washes that reveal underlying map-like demarcations. He allows himself to abstract and reduce his landscapes to their essentials. This is contemplative painting, suffused in a poetic sensibility.
