Luke Elwes | Constellation | Frestonian Gallery 2024

Luke Elwes: Constellation by Andrew Lambirth

 Luke Elwes is a painter intimately engaged with landscape and memory. He is a passionate traveller who responds to the world around him by making another parallel journey: to the inner passes of the self.

 Elwes spent the month of September 2022 in north Mayo, facing the Atlantic Ocean on the western edge of Ireland, having been awarded a fellowship by the Ballinglen Arts Foundation. He was given a cottage and a studio, which he didn’t much use as he continued his practice of working outdoors on large sheets of paper in all weathers. He usually works outside in the Essex marshes, at the former studio of Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson at Landermere Quay. He has been going back there regularly for the last 16 years, and has grown exceptionally receptive to the slightest change of tide and light. Inevitably, the place has become ‘a sort of fixed point’ in his life and work. As a result, he is used to marginal places, landscapes on the edge.

When he was younger Elwes visited parts of Ireland, Connemara for instance, so his Mayo sojourn was not exactly the discovery of a new place so much as the recovery of familiar territory. The area is suffused with history: Céide Fields, one of the earliest and most extensive neolithic field-systems in the world, is just a few miles from Ballycastle where he was based. The terrain is dominated by the Nephin mountain range, a name that translates as ‘Heavenly Sanctuary’ or ‘Finn’s Heaven’. (Finn MacCool being the legendary warrior hero who built the Giant’s Causeway.) Nephin is the highest stand-alone mountain in Ireland, and the name is perhaps related to nemeton, a sacred space in ancient Celtic religion, often found within a sacred grove.

As the references gather, one is reminded of past expeditions Elwes made, to Mount Kailash on the high Tibetan plateau in 1996, and to the ‘Hidden Kingdom’ of Mustang in 2008. Kailash in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology is the ‘World Pillar’ and the ‘Pathway to the Stars’, and Mustang is a corruption of the Tibetan word ‘Manthang', meaning ‘Plain of Aspiration’. Every new experience is informed by what we carry within us of the past, and likewise each painting Elwes makes draws upon a potent fund of memories and acquired knowledge. In this way, his paintings of Ireland also contain elements of other places, other experiences, as well as benefitting from the practical painting lore he has learnt over the years.

 County Mayo offers a landscape of greys and greens, varied with the white of sand and the black of rock or peat stacks. The sea is one range of greens, the bog another. Blue surprises with its power in this aqueous atmosphere. The German writer and Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll came to Mayo in 1954, later writing about it in his Irish Journal. Nothing fundamental has changed: ‘The sea was pale green, up front where it rolled onto the land, dark blue out towards the centre of the bay, and a narrow, sparkling white frill was visible where the sea broke on the island.’ And: ‘Azure spreads over the sea, in varying layers, varying shades; wrapped in this azure are green islands, looking like great patches of bog, black ones, jagged, rearing up out of the ocean like stumps of teeth…’

The coastline is wholly exposed to the fury of the Atlantic, yet it presents a variety of shape and profile, not all blunted into anonymity by the scouring elements. Achill Bay is an archipelago of islands, a vibrating arena of appearance and disappearance, as islands seem to come and go through the rain-soaked atmosphere. The weather varies swiftly and dramatically from brilliant sunshine to squalling rain (‘the rain here is absolute, magnificent and frightening’, wrote Böll), and this became a factor in the artist’s working strategy.

 When he first arrived, Elwes made a three-sheet watercolour of the bay, painted in a more naturalistic manner than usual, a direct transcription of his first impressions. The works on paper made during this Irish trip tend to be narrower than his habitual format, partly to make them more portable in extremes of weather: the lashing rain could erase an image entirely, and while Elwes welcomes the action of water on his work, he did not want to lose everything. In Ireland, the day is not complete without rain of some sort and measure.

Elwes’s paintings are built on soft grids and traces, on the ability to recognise the value of what others dismiss as worthless, or never even notice. His imagery is flowing, liquid, echoing the materials from which it is made. (He likes to quote Heraclitus: ‘Everything flows’.) He uses water-based paints flooded on to large sheets of heavy paper, or turps-thinned oil, encouraged to run swiftly across a canvas. He paints beside water, estuary or ocean, and the rhythm of his work is tidal, the ebb and flow of richly improvisatory responses: the layering of colour particles floating or submerged. Here is the flotsam and jetsam of history, in a continual process of statement, erasure and erosion.

 The grid has long been a central underlying structure to Elwes’s work, but he has never deserted the ground for the grid. The hidden dynamics of a tree that grows upwards yet spreads across, the traces of post and lintel architecture in so many of his earlier paintings, the vertical stripes (with horizontal crossings) of watery reflections, all these express versions of the axes that exist at 90 degrees to each other. The co-ordinates are there, even if not obviously delineated. At the same time, Elwes remains fascinated by the permeability of things, the state of flux in which we all exist.

Although Elwes makes good use of rectilinear structures, he recently saw his work in a useful new context. The experience of showing alongside Bridget Riley (at Frestonian Gallery in February 2023) was an informative one, making him aware that his approach was perhaps more formal than he had thought, but also that his grids were a lot more relaxed than Riley’s. Her surfaces with their extreme interplay of space and geometry, their dialogue of verticals, horizontals and diagonals, are much more starkly composed than his. The emphasis in Elwes’s practice on revealing and concealing is closer to the actions of natural forces, and this has been reinforced by the body of work resulting from his Mayo residency. There is a new expansiveness to the imagery, inspired by the comparison of marginal coastal sites (east of England and west of Ireland) and a fruitful intersection and overlap of interests.

These are images with a breadth and spaciousness, a play of visual field, that invite comparison with modern American painters much admired by Elwes: for instance, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, Cy Twombly and Brice Marden. Elwes operates in the borderland between abstraction and figuration, while deriving much of his inspiration from the world around him. Brice Marden spoke tellingly of ‘natural objects turning into, and not quite turning into, abstractions.’ This is the territory that Elwes investigates. Marden also described how drawing is about joining things up, making relationships and ‘at the same time letting the drawing itself do the work… They start out with observation and then automatic reaction, and then back off, so there’s layering of different ways of drawing.’ The layering for Elwes too inheres both in the methods of working and in the content.

These are points of reference only, by which to navigate and consider Elwes’s work.  Equally he draws inspiration from Chinese scrolls, with their intense dialogue between near and far. Or the waterfall prints of Hiroshige. Or, again, maps and sea charts and the gridded prayer flags of India and Tibet, all of which endeavour to bring a sense of order to the wild and chaotic. With such exemplars, Elwes has developed a wonderfully loose and flexible calligraphic style, originating in the works on paper, and which he has now begun to explore in his large oil paintings. The oils have gained some of the immediacy and spontaneity of the paper works, employing poured thin pigment to create their structures.

The imagery is as usual built up in layers, with a final application of turps run fast vertically down the canvas, invading and modifying the existing paint marks. This is countered and balanced by the other axis of the grid: paint run equally quickly horizontally across the field of action. The first time he attempted this strategy, Elwes could not entirely predict the results, but he has learnt what might happen and now proceeds with ever greater assurance. The whole of his painting practice is inflected by this potent combination of experience and risk. The process is one of constant obliterating and re-forming, advancing and retreating, as imagery is seen to be drifting in and out of view, and travelling from one place to another. That rhythm, nature’s peristalsis, permeates this new work.

 Initially, Elwes thought of titling this group of paintings ‘Drift’, but he realised that they had more to do with ‘constellations’; in his own words, ‘as in a group or cluster of similar things (forms and places), as well as a cluster of circling and returning thoughts and memories’. The notion of ‘constellations’ is borrowed from a series of 23 gouaches made by Joan Miró in 1940-41, through which he refreshed the poetic and calligraphic language of his art. Since they are all to do with the power of the imagination, with transparency, layering and intersecting forms, it’s easy to see why Elwes should be drawn to them.

Here is the distinguished French poet and art critic Jacques Dupin writing about Miró’s Constellations in his 1993 monograph on the artist: ‘Linear invention and rhythmic imagination are realised with miraculous purity. The interpenetration of graphism and chromaticism produces a counterpoint whose precision and spellbinding power irresistibly evoke music.’ Much the same could be said of Elwes’s fluent new paintings: through a radical and resourceful use of layering he by turns conceals and reveals his subject, in a kind of inspired calligraphic archaeology of painting. His researches offer us intriguing new prospects and perspectives loaded with meaning.

Luke Elwes | Bridget Riley 2023

'Luke Elwes | Bridget Riley' exhibition review, The Week, 11 February 2023

This small exhibition, Vision and the Visionary, makes a thoughtful and intriguing pairing of British painters.

The first, Bridget Riley, needs little in the way of introduction: a pioneer of op art, she is one of the most important artists to have emerged from this country since the War, her influence stretching beyond the art world. Riley is represented here by a handful of prints which, while marvellous, serve chiefly as a foil to the works on paper fielded by co-exhibitor Luke Elwes (b.1961).

The latter, happily, holds his own: based on his observations of light on water near his Essex studio, Elwes’s watercolours are beautiful things, vivid evocations of twilight colour set off against cracks of negative space. If the obvious reference is monet, tharte are also nods to abstract expressionism and older traditions still – the fractured structure of the compositions recalling Byzantine mosaics. Seen next to Riley’s complex compositions, the effect is often mesmerising.

Frestonian Gallery, 2 Olaf Street, London W11. Until 25 February 2023.

Luke Elwes at the Albers Foundation 2015

The Albers Foundation 2015  (An elemental studio) – Letter from Connecticut by Luke Elwes

“I’m standing in a beautiful studio with a huge four-meter square north facing window and a wide deck on the south side overlooking a rolling expanse of Connecticut woodland. One of two simple studio houses designed by a student of Joseph Albers for visiting artists (who in the past have included Ian Davenport, Ian McKeever and Rebecca Salter from the UK) it lies at the end of a forested trail, about half a mile beyond the Albers Foundation, a latter day shrine both to the Bauhaus and to the man who combined a lifetime’s homage to the square with firing up generations of American artists at Black Mountain College and Yale. Today this temple to modernism is a place of Zen-like calm, secluded in a wilderness of trees and water. 

During the space of time that I’ve been here I’ve set out each morning from my solitary hut in the woods in one direction or another to explore the territory and to observe the visible world move day by day from the cool luminosity and dry stillness of late winter to the explosive growth and iridescent colours of early summer.

As the light and temperature has changed so what I’ve been able to achieve by rapidly combining coloured inks, pigment and water on paper has also changed, and when eventually the stark outlines of the trees silhouetted in the crisp morning light gave way to an enveloping world of dense greenery and deepening shadows I took to the water – using a small rowing boat as my floating studio – to capture the constantly shifting patterns and sparkling reflections on the lake’s surface.

Working outside through the lengthening hours of daylight has been a wonderful way to record the passage of time by immersing myself (along with whatever materials come to hand) in this mutable parcel of earth and water, with results that are unpredictable and full of surprise in a way that the austere arrangement of space in Albers’ carefully calibrated squares can never be. Where his world is temperature controlled, held in timeless suspension, the world outside is simultaneously textured with age and the pulsing rhythm of life, a dynamic realm made up of birdsong, animal tracks, glacial rocks and thunderstorms.

There is no weather in the archive: a marked contrast to Jackson Pollock’s studio, which I went to see on Long Island. The place where he infused European abstraction with raw American energy may be close by but it is a world away from the Bauhaus laboratory; his studio floor, spattered with gobs & flecks of paint, resembles the wilderness outside, as if so many wind blown leaves and a sudden downpour had just swept through.

The tension between elemental energy and rhythmic structure, the interplay of vertical lines and floating forms, at once rising & dissolving, material and mercurial, is what I hope emerges from this new body of work, shown here much as it was when first made and put together on the studio walls in Connecticut.”

Luke Elwes was artist in residence at the Albers Foundation during April & May 2015

Historical note (taken from the Foundation website http://albersfoundation.org/):Josef and Anni Albers, lifelong artistic adventurers, were among the leading pioneers of twentieth-century modernism. The couple met in Weimar, Germany in 1922 at the Bauhaus. Josef Albers (1888–1976) was an influential teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist—now best known for the Homages to the Square he painted between 1950 and 1976 and for his innovative 1963 publication Interaction of Color.

Est Journal Interview 2014

On a day when you are heading out to create a piece of work in the countryside, what's the process? What time do you set out? What equipment do you take? What are your painting clothes? What do you take to eat and drink?

It largely depends on the conditions on any given day and, if I’m by the water, on the nature of the tides. The decision about when and where to go is more instinctive than planned, and for me this is a deliberate part of the working process, to allow continually for the unexpected. The only constant is that the work will be made outside in the open and executed in one continuous sitting. Often this means working without a break for two or three hours at a time.

Sometimes I begin the day by walking along the water’s edge in Landermere or when the tide is out by retracing new or familiar routes across the meandering tracks over the tidal marshes.  When the morning tide is rising I might row further out into the maze of creeks and inlets, to find some hidden corner of the backwaters. This could be soon after sunrise when the light is clear and the stillness is broken only by the sound of birds, or, on cold winter mornings, when the silent landscape is shrouded in a sea mist. Or it could be late afternoon, when the wind drops and vivid reflections play on the water’s surface, a time (often during the golden hour) when shadows throw the shapes of the land into relief or the low winter sun creates dark silhouettes in the silvery light. And occasionally I might continue on into the night, guided by the soft moonlight and working simply by feel and memory.

When I head out I carry only what is essential with me: a sheet of thick hand made paper taped onto a board and a shoulder bag with water and a box of materials, as well as some kind of waterproof and a plastic sheet, either for sitting on (where the ground is soft or wet) or for use as a makeshift windbreak, or for covering work in a sudden downpour. On colder days I use fingerless gloves to stop my hands freezing too quickly. At times, in an open boat or out on the marshes, I get very wet but that’s just part of the elemental engagement I’m looking for. In Vermont last year for example I would often set out for the day in snow boots and mountain jacket with a roll of paper and specially cut lengths of plywood tied with improvised rope handles that could be carried from place to place along the icy river banks.

Can you describe a typical day when you're working in this way? Again, what's the process?

There isn’t really a typical day, although at times I find myself concentrating on a particular patch of ground, a location that might be long familiar to me but which I want to revisit under new conditions as a way of extending the conversation between past and present, between what resides in memory and what emerges in the present moment.

Sometimes I work continuously over a period of days, rapidly making and remaking a series of smaller images, only some of which I will keep. At other times I will work on one large image from the beginning to the end of the day, recording the shifting weather and light as well as the constantly mutating shapes that rise and fall in the tidal waters. There is also a solitary oak tree by the water’s edge that I return to at different times of the year, continually recording its passage through the seasons from the spare intricacy of its winter outlines to the unfurling growth of spring and the dense verdancy of summer.

Often I will work on smaller pieces at an old wooden table that faces out onto the creek in front of the King’s Head in Landermere, or if it’s going to be a larger piece I’ll cut a two meter length of paper and fix it to an old wooden door that lies on the ground. The paper is then saturated in rain or river water before being marked and stained with pens, crayons, coloured ink and gouache. Often I combine these with mud or other organic matter found on site, and in order to keep the image fluid and malleable I will then allow the rising tide to wash over and even submerge the picture surface during the working process. In this way I can continue to work without pause for many hours, allowing the various pigments to float, drip and run over an absorbent surface, before they eventually begin to settle and dry on the paper. Often the result is surprising and unpredictable, with earlier markings resurfacing through transparent overlays or delicately mapped out areas fading away beneath opaque washes. Only when the image has completely dried out, which can take some days (particularly if the atmosphere is damp), can I then see how the assorted natural and man made elements have combined and whether I feel it has succeeded or failed as a picture. 

What is it about East Anglian landscapes that attract you – and how do you decide on specific locations?

The specific locations are incidental, it’s more to do with their proximity to water. The estuarine and coastal landscapes of East Anglia often seem on the verge of dissolution, of melting away into an empty expanse of sea and sky. Beyond the tideline they have an unfixed quality, marginal and uncultivated - a wilderness of reflecting light and shifting patterns. Robert Macfarlane describes in his essay ‘Silt’ this soft bluish silvery haze that causes the elements to ‘blend and interfuse’, producing a ‘new country’ that is ‘neither earth nor sea’.

When I first saw the Blackwater estuary on a silent winter’s day fifteen years ago, the glistening expanse of mud and silt reminded me of the desert. One of the islands in this luminous tidal realm - Osea Island - seemed to float like a mirage on the horizon. Only accessible at low water via an old Roman causeway, it was otherwise completely cut off, a self contained parcel of space and time, and the sense I had that day (and the many that followed over a seven year period) of being alternately connected and isolated was very appealing. The place moved to its own rhythm, a vessel of ancient history whose fragile lineaments were constantly being broken up and recomposed by the surrounding waters.

I stayed on the island for periods throughout the year, recording on paper its ever-changing liminal quality while enjoying (in contrast to the extended journeys across unfamiliar terrain which have often informed my painting process) the sense of sitting in one place and watching nature’s myriad forms pass me by. And beneath the surface, there was the constant pull of the past, of glimpsing in the mud and creeks fragments of the island’s history - old tracks, boat carcasses, shell banks and oyster beds - as well as those transient signs of more recent use, the remnants of a Victorian pier and empty concrete bunkers.

The layers of the past buried in the soft ground of the East Anglian coast have entered literature and my reading of Great Expectations as well as W.G.Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and Roger Deakin’s essays have also played a part in my work. About eight years ago, when we left the island and moved further north along the Essex coastline to a location at the end of a rutted farm track that now sits precariously on the edge of Landermere creek in the Walton backwaters, I was fascinated to discover that Arthur Ransom had based his book Secret Water on the surrounding maze of islands, channels and inlets. Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose was also filmed here.

There is in these low lying landscapes a hidden quality, places of silence and occasional abandonment, where nature rises and falls, where things appear and disappear in the cycle of tides, and the passage of other lives drift to the sound of birds and waves – an often floating world where the mind slows down and reflects.

How does the weather on the day affect, influence and guide the creative process. Have there been any extreme examples of this? When and where were they?

The elements are an essential part of it, and with the work on paper done here in East Anglia it is the weather’s unpredictability that guides the process, preventing the easy repetition of familiar motifs or any certain knowledge of the outcome. I can begin working on a clear day and suddenly what I’m seeing vanishes into a fog or rolling storm clouds. The shapes I’m drawing start to merge and dissolve while rain spatters and dapples the coloured surface, and sometimes washes it away entirely. In wintertime the north easterly winds can make it hard to work at all, while on a dry summer’s day I often have to work much faster, before the crayons I’m using become too soft or the pigments too dry, leaving the paper’s surface frustratingly static and unresponsive. But there have also been times when I’ve felt I’m wrestling with rather than responding to the weather. Making watercolour drawings in the dawn light on the Tibetan plateau was complicated by the water turning into ice on my brush, a problem I also encountered in Vermont when trying to wash the surface of a large picture in a mountain stream and then watching as icy particles formed all over it. In these extreme environments, snow can also fall rapidly, carpeting the ground where I’m working, and when it melts, as it did later on in the month I spent by the Gihon river, the snow and ice floods the landscape and tears away trees and vegetation from the banks. At the other extreme I’ve worked in arid desert locations where I’ve had to be very sparing with the water I ‘m carrying so there’s enough left to drink as well as to mix paints. And when it finally ran out on one occasion I had to fall back on a can of coke to finish the picture.

It seems like there is a complex, symbiotic, relationship of creativity within the process, where nature is shaping the work as much as you are 'shaping' nature by fixing it, however loosely, on paper/canvas. Is that right? Could you elucidate on that at all?

Yes, I think that’s a good way of putting it. Explaining this relationship in another article I said that ‘the final image belongs as much to the elements as the artist who began it’. This applies particularly to the work on paper but relates equally to my paintings which although much longer in gestation are also a record of process and time. Some years ago I did a series of paintings based on a journey to the Himalayas where I wanted to represent the way the natural minerals and pigments, found locally in the earth and rocks, are used to paint man made surfaces with vibrant symbolic colours and how, through the corrosive action of wind and water, they eventually dissolve back into the ground.  Andrew Lambirth said of these works at the time: ‘everything is reduced to dust eventually by the elements, but in the meantime we may enjoy the trace of their being’.

If the paintings are a meditation on this process, often done from memory in the studio, the work on paper has a more immediate and visceral relationship to the natural world; they are both about, and shaped by, the place where they’re made. Perhaps this is best elucidated if I describe the way the process might begin: by registering marks, things that catch the eye - a passing bird, a blossom, a cloud, tracks in the mud, bits of flora and fauna. An accumulation of phenomena, both distant and close at hand, that creates a kind of equivalence, a response on a particular day to a place. It appears familiar but remains strange, a mutable scene that is never quite the same as the days blur and seasons shift, where streams alter their course, swelling and diminishing over time, and where mud flats that were previously sparkling black and silver are now softly carpeted in pale grass and wild flowers. What forms is a series of recorded moments, a diary of days composed of sequential memories (recalling the last time I was here) and sensory stimuli of the most immediate and fragile kind. It is a way of proceeding that is openly receptive, avoiding correction or revision while keeping the elements continually in play. The materials I use dictate this process, so a picture of the water is made with the water, the scattered marks and colours running in a way that directly mirrors the tidal flow that surrounds it or the rain that sweeps over it. The writer Robert Macfarlane put it this way in a letter he sent a while ago:

‘I might try to articulate what I find so unusual and compelling about the work: its localism, for a start. But also the hover between encryption and archetype (enigma and fabulous openness).  As you hold on to a leaf, a shell, feather or pebble before returning it to its microcosmos, you learn to see not the names of things but the things themselves. Absolutely. We are both collectors, but not in the possessive sense of that word; quite the opposite. Surrenderers of sorts.’ NB. Robert Macfarlane is the author of The Wild Places (Granta, 2008) and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin 2012)

A sense of place feels like a starting point, but perhaps not an end point, for your work. If they are landscapes, or maps, then they would seem to record internal worlds as much as topographical ones. Similarly, they could be seen as recording time, duration – as much as place. Of course, time and duration are needed if we are dealing with concepts of flux, transience etc. Is this part of what you are exploring?

A sense of place is the essential starting point, as is the experience of journeying through it, responding as Richard Long described it, ‘to the earth moving beneath your feet’.  But the work is also about memory and time as much as what is seen – the memory of what was once there, as well as the memory of previous work done in same place. The paintings become a way of examining my own transient presence as well as the changing nature of the landscape itself. By way of example, when walking along a mountain trail you can see the path travelled yesterday stretching behind you and the day to come running ahead of you. In this sense time and space become synonymous.

The pictures record not only those ephemeral moments of personal submersion but also chart a deeper history, tracing out those often barely discernible fragments and stories (whose signs are often lost or barely discernible) that make up a place, the invisible yet palpable layers which lie within and beneath the surface. The rushing mountain stream I worked beside for a month in Vermont for example, was called the ‘Gihon’ (named after one of the four mythical rivers of Eden) and seemed to contain within its flow the quiet language of the past.As with my earlier desert paintings they combine the mapping out in space, on paper and canvas, of a physical journey with a kind of cultural excavation that speaks of duration, time passing. This experience was especially acute in Vermont where I set out to create a visual diary by making one picture a day in one place over the course of a month as winter turned to spring.  Despite these differing approaches and locations there is in all the work a sense of the present erasing the past, something physically manifest in the shadow lines left in the residue of coloured ink or the evidence of earlier drawings occasionally glimpsed through subsequent layers of paint. For the critic Nicholas Usherwood, writing about the work in 2009, it speaks of ‘a continuous process of loss and recovery’.

Finally – and quite a vague and encompassing question: can you give me some thoughts on the use of abstraction in landscape painting?

I find both ‘abstract’ and ‘landscape’ somewhat limiting terms - I’m more interested in working at the edge, or on the margins of both. There is always a fixed starting point in time and place, a relation to the exterior world of phenomena that allows for a dialogue with an interior space of recollection and feeling, but this is less to do with ‘taking in’ a landscape as the idea of ‘landscape’ itself and what this means in relation to other times and cultures. Early on I was fascinated by the desert paintings of aboriginal Australians, images that were read at the time by a western audience as abstract patterns but which in fact directly recounted their experience of walking over ancestral ground. They did not paint the horizon because they could not touch it.  My aim likewise is to be as receptive to the surface of the visual field I’m moving across as what lies unseen beneath it. The paintings grow out of particular encounters with places both distant and near, and the subsequent marks deployed on canvas and paper can be read as hieroglyphic texts - or even as maps of the ‘geographical unconscious’ – that set out to evoke both the trail of our presence and the passage of time.  They place, as Odilon Redon once put it, ‘the logic of the visible in the service of the invisible’. (‘La logique du visible au service de l’invisible’.)

Critics Choice London 2010

Curated by Andrew Lambirth

Glancing through the pages of past catalogues dedicated to the work of Luke Elwes, a strong sense of continuity emerges. Elwes paints the concept of travel: he is a pilgrim in search of identity – his own as much as the spirit of the place through which he journeys. His paintings have a particularity which is emotionally sensitive yet formally tough, as he focuses on the traces left by mankind in his passage through time and the world. Elwes puts us in perspective. He has travelled widely, and one of his most consistently inspiring journeys has been to the Himalayas, where he was much struck by the earth and mineral colours splashed on walls. In his new paintings he revisits Nepal through the prism of more recent experiences in the backwaters of Essex, and the reflections of foliage and sky. ‘Passage’ proposes a spatial arrangement of black pillars to articulate the warm pinks and blues of its aetherial context.  ‘Portal’ explores the threshold between inside and outside, a vista of hallucinatory blue bringing the outside firmly into the picture. In ‘Refuge’ the dark doorway and window seem to offer a sanctuary from the piercing light. Vague columns of intermittent colour are embedded in the swirling patterns of Elwes’ canvases.  Everything is reduced to dust eventually by the elements, but in the meantime we may enjoy the trace of their being.

CRITICS CHOICE, BROWSE & DARBY, LONDON  14 APRIL - 7 MAY 2010

5 London Painters 2009

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 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.

London Painters in Italy 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 recognize 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.

Reclaiming the Landscape 2007

Introduction to Reclaiming the Landscape of our Lives 2007

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...