The idea of a journey is central to his painting, both its physical and temporal unfolding and its recollection in memory. The surfaces recall maps, tracing the marks of history and the fragile signs of belief, and moving between what is revealed and concealed of these often empty and distant terrains. Rooted in the particular, the images also probe an interior space. Andrew Lambirth has written about them: ‘The map is nearly erased, a distressed palimpsest; it’s difficult to decipher a single clear meaning. The viewer must, like a scryer, read the signs and interpret accordingly'.

Selected texts on Luke Elwes

Silent kingdom 2011 

Catalogue text by Andrew Lambirth (published by Adam Gallery, London & Bath, 2011)

Constable spoke of landscape painting as a branch of natural philosophy, and there is a case for the otherworldly landscapes of Luke Elwes to be seen as a branch of philosophical enquiry. Elwes explores the landscape of memory, the history and spirit of places, but at the same time evokes the journey into self, which is not about the indulgences of autobiography or self-expression, but primarily concerned with the intermingled layering of time and experience. He takes a particular path, chooses to follow certain threads, and spins out his indefinite painterly narratives in imagery of a delicacy that seems to contradict its formal robustness. He works with trace rather than statement, with suggestion rather than description. He aims to capture atmosphere and the ephemeral effect, but also the underlying truths which hold the key to the pattern.

His paintings can resemble veils, with vertical bands of colour emerging through them, a little like faded banners, the vertical frequently played off against a horizontal element or axis. (The horizon line or division of sky and earth is another principal means of apportioning the picture space.) A marker pole appears in a current of light, of water, of cloud. There might be a suggestion of a window or doorway, a rectangle of darkness, or an opening through a surface – which might be a wall – onto other light, a featureless prospect or perhaps one full of invisible potential, like the future. The laden atmosphere is filled with motes, of dust, of memories. The past helps to shape the present before it metamorphoses once again into the future. Elwes investigates the relationship of parts.

In a very literal sense, it’s all about placement, spatial conjunctions, the dispersal and articulation of related elements. In the oils on canvas, the objects painted, such as they are, are often of an architectural nature, and have the appearance of presenting abraded surfaces, weather-worn and aged, witness surely to countless events and histories. But are they actually eroded, these partially-stated surfaces? Are they really losing their detail? Perhaps in fact they are seen only dimly, as through a haze or a clouded lens.

Sometimes the focus pulls away so much that we appear to be off-Earth, viewing the planet from afar. But then the subtly non-spherical shape on the picture plane suggests we are actually looking at a snowy hill resembling the Earth. Certainly we are looking at the edge of something, a rim, a dividing point and threshold. This liminal quality, which is also allied to his fascination for maps, is an abiding theme of Elwes’ work.

If the paintings in the main derive from the artist’s travels abroad, the works on paper deal with a subject much closer to home: the stretch of land and water at Landermere in Essex. Here Elwes spends time in the marginal territory of rivers and tributaries, marsh-land for the most part, where water is a way of life. The effects of light on water, so easily (and lazily) reduced to an optical dazzle, are carefully analyzed and re-formulated in watercolours of great subtlety and considerable seduction.

The works on paper are decidedly crisper in their distinctions than the oils – their areas of “thing” and “no-thing”, the pattern of white which emerges through the delicate skeins of paint, the insistent linearity and the subtle layering of colour. Occasionally the particles are distributed across the picture plane like autumn leaves in an aerial ballet, or fragments of vegetation floating on a placid lake. The patterns gather and writhe into new configurations: the root system of a tree, the crow’s-foot spread of a river into a delta, the eddy and swirl of clearly-observed moving water carrying a cargo of flotsam. Occasionally it is as if we are looking through a faded and torn fabric onto some brightly-coloured spectacle beyond, revealed only in tantalizing glimpses.

Other associations reach into the mind: reflections of the winter branches of trees threshing the wind; a landscape seen at dawn or dusk, in moments of swift extremity and flux; shadows breaking up into their constituents of coloured light; weather charts exquisitely detailed with temperature-colour variations. The incidents of colour on a softly modulated ground suggest medal ribbons at a parade or the bright plumage of small birds on an autumn day. One cannot escape the feeling that Elwes portrays this finest of filigrees  – his net or mesh in which to catch experiences  – so often because, having identified it, he wants to explore the utter permeability of our world, and its state of constant change due to influence. How, in effect, everything influences and affects everything else, touches it, touches us, and whether we like it or not, we are moulded by our environment.

He is also casting a net of connectedness over what he sees, reaffirming his recognition of man’s place in the story – which is properly one of co-operation and co-existence rather than dominion. There is a wonderful equality of attention to these paintings, an all-over-ness which helps to account for their surprisingly assured appeal.

Elwes makes a kind of celestial confetti, a serene fusion of light and the motes dancing in it. He might also be painting a million million prayers, written on multi-coloured scraps of paper and scattered to the ends of the earth, falling alike on fallow ground or fertile, but all heard by God. Whatever its cause, there is a quiet joy to his meditations, which chimes well with the understated beauty of his images. 

Genius Loci 2008

Catalogue text by Luke Elwes (published by Galleria Ceribelli, Lubrina Editore,2008)

An artist’s encounter with a place is always uncertain and provisional. What is selected from its visible architecture, its particular light and forms, depends on what remains or is recalled in memory. What is seen and experienced is conditioned by other places and other times, just as in the act of painting, where the continuous process of loss and recovery, erasure and repetition, becomes a reflection on how the past is enfolded in the present.
The image is a space whose visible dimension is inseparable from what remains concealed, below the surface and out of sight. It is what remains absent from the picture that draws the artist back to a place. The desire to record or embody some aspect of the experience is balanced by the knowledge that something unknowable and mysterious remains intact and out of reach. The paintings operate in the shared border between the physical and the metaphysical.
The exploration of a particular place or territory often takes the form of a journey, of going out (leaving home) in order to see the self more clearly. The images made on return are a way of illuminating that encounter, of mapping an experience ghosted by time, as well as marking my own brief presence and the recurring traces of other histories and cultures. In the course of painting, what is recalled - the tracery of desert tracks and pilgrim paths (in Cross for example) or the patterns left like ‘a hieroglyphic text’ on the walls of a temple or inside a hermit’s cell - is as important as what is buried or concealed from view - in the occluded spaces suggested by the darkened doorways and apertures, in the returning tide of Blackwater and the empty space of Boundary.
There are other signs as well - the silent markers, the stone steps, and vestigial crosses - whose original meaning has drifted with age. It is, as Kapuzcinski says about the travels of Herodotus, ‘another expression of man’s struggle against time, against the fragility of memory, its ephemerality, its perpetual tendency to erase itself and disappear’.This space of recollection also unfolds at a certain distance: what is seen is viewed from afar, or else carefully framed, as though through a window. They operate in a way that is sometimes similar to Mannocci’s images, and which W.G. Sebald has described, in relation to memory, ‘as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height.. and curiously, although it’s further removed, the image seems much more precise’.  The new work also carries echoes of previous encounters and paintings, often of deserts and islands. They exist in the same liminal space, in the shifting margins and uncertain borders between earth, water, and sky.
 

 Art First 2007
Catalogue text by Anthony Fawcett (published by Art First, London & New York,2007)

The timing of this exhibition seems strange but appropriate. As I write the sound of musicians are ringing out across the globe in honor of Live Earth.  It seems to symbolize a challenge which is now building with breathless urgency. 
My immediate response to your work was raw – it seemed to take me back to the Pilgrim series and then to re-evoke the feelings of pain which I experienced when I tried to engage with it back in 1997.  The contemplative calm which permeates the work seems too transcendental to me.  Damn it, I say to myself, I had enough of this stuff with Catholicism and now my friend is back doing his bloody moon walk again – who needs it? 
Well, clearly me for a start – art is supposed to challenge us in exactly this way.  When I first saw the images of earth beamed back at us from space during our childhood I was full of wonder.  I still am.  But when I try to live my daily life it can just feel too damned hard.  The pain we all have to face…bereavement, sickness, old age, death, the need to earn a daily crust, the difficulty of anger, the need for love, the weight of responsibility…what are we doing here?  None of us know the answer to this. 
However, we do know that through millennia we keep creating art.  Our ancestors descend to paint on the walls of caves.  The need for food and shelter is interrupted.  Something sacred stirs.  A new dimension emerges in our relationship to the world and to each other.  Thousands of years later Chaim Soutine hangs a rotting carcass in a Parisian apartment and starts to paint with venom and fire.  A new century sounds which produces two such barbaric wars that there can be few whom we know whose family did not lose loved ones.  On the wall of my apartment I have a photograph of my grandmother’s family in New Zealand.  It still seems heartbreaking to me that the two eldest boys were dead within five years of it being taken.  If we are this poor at getting along with each other then how on earth (on earth indeed….) are we supposed to save the planet into the bargain….
So, what are you up to, my friend? What would Chaim Soutine have made of your work?  If he were me then he would have howled in frustration and chucked your CD at the wall and then realized first, that this need for ascent is essential – probably as important now as at any point in our history - and that, secondly, his/my own considerably less patient and more fiery temperament could do with the occasional reminder of the need for belief and inspiration, that beauty can be a refuge and that the world can still enchant.  Whatever we are up to, transcendence seems to me to imply a recognition that the self centered rush of our everyday lives needs context and that the context extends to horizons which we cannot see but which we must preserve.
This work is full of transcendence.  Even when you are not evoking the nature of the globe itself (Locus, Corpus) you’re still giving us aerial views (Cross, Blue Passage, Trail).  Jeez, kid, you are so bloody high that you give me vertigo.  I find it irritatingly cerebral and polished but it is certainly provocative and breathtakingly beautiful.
My favorites are Maya and Ascent. Maya because it reminds me of my two trips to Mount Kailash – the mountain seems to loom in the background, suggestive rather than literal; a single square beckons – an opening into another way for a weary pilgrim short of breath on the roof of the world – an evocation of the notion that we must travel into the heart of the mountain as well as around it.  I see the mist which would so often lie on the Himalayan mountains when I first caught the morning light; and the sense that spiritual truth is not something which can be explained but only experienced.

Ascent is interesting because it is a painting in which the perspective does not seem as obviously elevated as most of the others (its title therefore intrigues me).  It is more suggestive to me of charting a course through a channel, feeling our way forward into an unmapped sea, reminding me of the great myths of the Mediterranean: Odysseus or Jason.  So that is where I will end – interesting that the sense of ascent leads me to a sea-bound journey. But finishing with the sea seems appropriate – a reminder of your years on Osea, a counterpoint to your own love of the desert - and, of course, when photographed from space the earth is not the green of the environmental activists but the blue of the great folk tradition of the American south. Anthony Fawcett (New York, July 2007)

London Painters in Italy 2007

Gli Amici Pittori di Londra, curated by Lino Mannocci (published by Galleria Ceribelli & Lubrina Editions, Italy 2007)

With Luke Elwes I recognise and in some ways share his manner of working: the desire to contain the sign language behind the magical surfaces he creates. During his many travels Elwes has immersed himself completely in the new realities he perceives and has absorbed to saturation point the dominant aspects, often related intimately to sacred objects or beliefs in their various forms. It is only after his return home that he works through the records he has created to yield a distillation of what he has experienced. His work demonstrates how he resolves these influences in canvases devoid of grandiose gestures but perfectly controlled. They are canvases that seem to have been born divinely inspired, as it were with helmet and armour in place.

There is in England a long tradition of travelling painters who, armed with easel, canvas and brush, scour the world for subjects to paint. This is not Luke Elwes’s way of working. When he travels, Luke involves himself with all his being, seeking the new realities by total immersion in them. It is only afterwards, the voyage over, on the return to London, in the seclusion of his studio, that he embarks on the process of distillation and synthesis. It is as though this displacement of time and space is the necessary filter for recovering the essence of the experiences he has lived through.
Elwes frequently starts a picture by scribbling on the canvas, making signs, as with typescript. These marks are then covered with a thin film of paint which in turn may be removed by dripping on to the new surface thus created a diluting agent  such as turpentine. It is difficult to predict the effect on the canvas of these drops and trickles. The danger of losing the image completely is an essential part of the creative process, involving a degree of excitement stimulated by the risk involved in this process. In his newer paintings Elwes achieves thinner surfaces resulting in more complex effects; notwithstanding the inherently random effects of the process the painter is increasingly drawn to these techniques.

Luke Elwes at Art First 2004

The (London) Independent, Sep 21, 2004  by Sue Hubbard

THE MAP has become for many a modern painter and poet a metaphorical, almost sacred object. In a secular world it exerts a fascination; the empty spaces and the unknown territories beckon. To travel has become synonymous with the pilgrim's journey into the heart of darkness. It is to lay oneself open to new experiences, to new ways of seeing the world. The place between "here" and "somewhere else" may be the very place that must be traversed in order to reach "there", to know, as Eliot said, "the place for the first time".

The Christian pilgrimage was both an actual journey and a voyage to the centre of the self, while psychoanalysis is often described in terms of travel in an unknown land. To be a true pilgrim requires that one is watchful, observant, aware of subtle shifts and changes - both in the external landscape through which one travels as well as in the internal. In the silence of the wilderness we are able to rediscover the language of memory and our links with what is ancient; the stars, the sea, the wind.

Over the past decade, the painter Luke Elwes has made journeys to the tablelands of the Hopi Indians in New Mexico, the central Australian desert, the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, and to the Buddhist sacred mountain Mount Kailash in the Tibetan plateau. The result has been a series of landscapes that not only captures something of the physicality of these sacred places but which also speaks of the empty loneliness that is at the spiritual core of much creativity.
"Compass" is Elwes's fourth exhibition at the London gallery Art First. The mixed-media paintings on paper, created by subtle layers of washes and marks, signal a shift of emphasis, while also revisiting the concerns of his series "Pilgrim" (based on the expedition to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar in Tibet), "Sanctuary" (which grew from a journey to the caves of Cappadocia) and "Osea" (inspired by an island only a couple of hours from London).

His oils on linen deal with the contrast between dark and light, space and edges. Compass, a monochromatic ellipse, might be read as a sacred eye, whilst also suggesting something of a medieval Mappa Mundi, created around a central sacred place such as Jerusalem or Rome. Although implicitly abstract, the physical world is never far away in these paintings; they suggest the expansive horizons of sea or the sky breaking from night into dawn. Light emanates from beyond the edge of a fecund semi-circle in Gaze (above), again suggesting the pupil of an eye or the edge of a planet revolving in deep space.

Elwes's territory is both familiar and strange, distant and yet somehow known. As the French philosopher-poet Gaston Bachelard wrote in Poetics of Space, "We cover the universe with drawings we have lived." The thinly layered surfaces echo patterns of weather and erosion; marks are made then washed away or erased. Ancient pathways across plains, deserts or fields are suggested to create, as Elwes has said, "spaces which are mapped by belief rather than measured by science". These pathways are markers in the emptiness of the canvas, making sense of the space as they also attempt to make sense of the world.

Luke Elwes at Art First 2002 

Exhibition text by Andrew Lambirth. London, May 2002

Luke Elwes (b. 1961) is a painter-traveller, making pictures which are at once about the particular places he has visited and a record of that journey into self which is the lot of the true contemplative. In his recent evocations of Osea Island off the Essex coast, Elwes maps the almost-submerged land where earth and sea not only meet but mingle intimately. He writes of the making of these elusive paintings (apparently empty yet full of detail) as encompassing 'the pursuit of silence, a balance between something and nothing, that holds the eye and stills the impulse to literal transcription'. The map is nearly erased, a distressed palimpsest; it's difficult to decipher a single clear meaning. The viewer must, like a scryer, read the signs and interpret accordingly.

Crossing, Reclaiming the Landscape of our Lives

(Mark Barrett, Darton Longman & Todd, London 2001, new edition 2007) 

The title of this book, Crossing, is borrowed from that of a painting by the contemporary artist Luke Elwes. The painting is reproduced on the cover. Crossing is an abstract landscape, at once the earth from space, a m ap of innumerable root-like pathways across a desert and a patterning of light and colour. The painting combines meandering lines, paths which unfold across its surface, with innumerable tiny crosses that mark the way – the very warp and woof of the brushwork. At the same time, the overall shape of the painting seems to lead us through a movement of  light and dark that is both a single day and the pattern of a lifetime. This is a painting that invites us to become travellers in the landscape of our own lives. As the artist himself says:‘The lines are the paths of our own life, and the meandering course of all life, of branches, trees, roots and riverbeds. In their uninterrupted movement lies the search for markers, the signposts we need if we are to draw our own maps’.  From this painting arises the theme I shall be exploring in the chapters that follow...

5 London Painters, Leeds 2009

Curated by Nicholas Usherwood, with exhibition text, October 2009

Unlike many curated shows of the present moment, this selection of work is not dominated by an intellectual scheme but rather by the selectors’ long-standing interest in, and admiration for, the work of the artists concerned (none of whom, remarkably enough, has ever shown substantially in the city before, even Leeds-born Christopher P. Wood). Thus Maurice Cockrill RA (b 1936), the most senior figure here and a painter always much admired by other artists nationally and internationally, has developed his painterly abstraction to a point where the subject and form of his painting emerges from the free flow of gesture and the encouragement of chance.

Stephen Chambers RA (b.1960), like Maurice Cockrill, is a Royal Academician but of a rather younger generation, his paintings, rich with precise drawing and luminous decorative colour, transforms the familiar and everyday, delivering to us a world of great beauty and exotic mystery.

Lino Mannocci (b1945) was born in Italy but has lived and worked in London since graduating from the Slade in 1975. Since then he has shown all over the world though principally in London and Italy. His paintings, with their characteristically limited pallet of sophisticated whites and muted earths create scenes of seemingly infinite quietude and poetry.

Luke Elwes (b1961) came to prominence in the early 1990s with a series of remarkable exhibitions that developed out of his exploratory travels to a wide range of different landscapes worldwide and are, in some sense, a reminiscence, or distillation, of that experience. He seeks to document the inner experience of his journeys by exploring the memories which surface through the act of painting, a process which for Elwes, is ‘a continuous process of loss and recovery.’

Christopher P.Wood (b1961), though born in Leeds, where he continues to live and work, graduated from Chelsea in 1986 and it is through a succession of solo exhibitions in London that he has established his reputation as a painter of great imaginative vision, an explorer of the inner world, weaving together imagery drawn from a huge variety of sources in a rich painterly fabric of dream-like character.

Five artists then with apparently rather different concerns yet, all of them, in one way or another, drawn to the power of paint as a means to transform and heighten our understanding of the world and its innate, imaginative richness.