Writing on water: exhibition review

                                                 Exhibition review by  Andrew Lambirth 29 March 2014

Luke Elwes Adam Gallery, 67 Mortimer Street, W1 | John Street, Bath, until 28 March | 29 March until 16 April

By way of spiritual respite, I would like to mention an exhibition of the latest paintings on paper by Luke Elwes (born 1961). These are being shown in the Adam Gallery’s new London premises, whereupon they will transfer to the gallery’s Bath headquarters. Over recent years, Elwes has been developing a language of near-abstract touches of floating colour in shifting patterns, shattered and elliptical, like confetti on a cobbled pavement that is also a river. (If you’re looking for comparisons, the nearest I can come is to the American painter associated with the Abstract Expressionists, Mark Tobey.)

This flexible and evocative language has reached a new peak in a series of paintings made in Vermont during a month’s residency last year, exploring the wild landscape of the Green Mountains and the Gihon River that flows through it. The style and technique (a mixed-media secret closely guarded from his many would-be followers) is admirably suited to depicting the reflective and troubled surface of moving water, and Elwes puts all his skills to good effect in this magnificent new series. A source of contemplation in turbulent times: recommended.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 29 March 2014

A Watery world

Novelist & journalist Vanora Bennett writes about the exhibition:

One of the best contemporary British painters I know of – a man fascinated by the physical environment he lives in and the effect that people have on it - is Luke Elwes. Naturally enough for an artist who draws his inspiration from the low-lying flatlands of Essex (which, over thousands of years, are slowly sinking into the sea like the rest of England’s east coast, while the western coast equally slowly rises) the subject he paints is water. His latest work – a series of 24 subtle evocations of a river, entitled Luke Elwes: Writing on Water - is currently exhibited at the Adam Gallery in central London.

Elwes’s water paintings, while always decorative and delicately painterly in their finish, have something disturbing about them too. The water whose ebb and flow he charts so poetically often swirls around abandoned doors and buildings – marks of human attempts to conquer the tides that have been abandoned. The blues, greens, greys and pinks of moving liquid ease smoothly around the sharp red-and-brown lines of the remnants of mankind's failures...

Read the whole article here

The Luke Elwes: Writing on Water exhibition is at the Adam Gallery, 13 John Street, Bath from 31 March to 16 April.