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.

Shifting Patterns , Sladers Yard 2018

Exhibition text by Anna Powell, Director Sladers Yard, September 2018

As Bridport Open Studios approaches, Alex Lowery’s paintings explore the Chesil Beach. From West Bay to Portland, his pictures offer a new way of looking at this coastline. Again and again visitors tell us how they have gone out after seeing the exhibition and noticed colours and viewpoints they have never seen before. I do it myself and feel very lucky not only to be with the paintings all day but then to go out into the landscape that inspires them and see it with his eyes. This extraordinary summer has been the perfect setting for Alex’s infinite seas and skies and the heady turquoise in the smoky soda-fired surfaces of Jack Doherty’s elemental porcelain vessels.

 On 22 September we are moving from light to water as the theme (although light is crucial in this too). The new show, entitled Currents, brings together four painters who look at water in different ways. For Janette Kerr, water is deeply dynamic, whipped up the by wind and portrayed in energetic expressionist brush strokes. Vanessa Gardiner’s water is often a well of opaque colour, with geometrically divided areas of froth and shadow. Her blues sing out in rich notes calling to us. It’s a pleasure to watch people respond. Julian Bailey’s joyous seas seem to sparkle and move with thick impasto paint and quick gestural brush strokes. Luke Elwes turns the surface of water into a shimmering meditation.

Luke Elwes came to this gallery through Alex Lowery. The two have shown together numerous times over the years, at the Estorick Collection in London, here at Sladers and most recently in Bergamo, Italy. Both artists make ambitious work in subtle, understated intelligent ways. As well as paintings Luke writes and talks about art in the Royal Academy Magazine, Galleries Magazine, on BBC Radio 4 and abstractcritical.com.

Luke Elwes’ own paintings involve layers of painting – areas of rich colour interspersed with white – which are dissolved and floated sometimes with river water or oil paint thinners and allowed to trickle or flow across the paper or canvas. The results seem to reflect light and invite the viewer to look into them as if they were pools of water.

‘For me,’ Luke has written, ‘it has become a way of marking my own transient presence in the flow of phenomena, of paying quiet attention to the shifting patterns on the water, the fall of light on a given day, and the incidental life that passes across one’s visual field. Beneath all this, there is also the delicate registering of material erasures, the disappearances and the brief resurgences, the momentary recollection of this place’s silent (sinking) past.’

Luke’s early years were spent in Iran, where the light and space of the desert were a formative influence. He studied History at Bristol University and Painting at Camberwell Art School between 1979 and 1985, and Art History at Birkbeck College, London University, becoming an MA in 2007. While working at Christies, he began to travel and write and in 1987 met Bruce Chatwin who inspired a trip to Australia. Since then he has continued to travel extensively, discovering and revisiting remote locations in India, Asia Minor and North Africa. In 1998 he was artist in residence on an expedition to Mount Kailash, a holy mountain in western Tibet. Since 2000 he has worked for long periods on an island off the East Coast of the UK. In 2013 he was awarded a grant to study at the Vermont Studio Center and in 2015 he was resident artist at the Albers Foundation (USA).

The idea of the journey is central to his painting, both its physical and temporal unfolding and its recollection in memory. Rooted in the particular, the images also explore an interior space.‘The future is not knowable country,’ he has written. ‘Out on the Essex marshes where I work, everything changes. It becomes an untended wilderness of dissolving paths and silted up streams where creeks and channels endlessly mutate in the tidal salt waters. Beyond the fragmentary system of sea walls and dykes one encounters an un-tethered world, prone to flooding and now bearing silent witness to the cumulative effects on this fragile ecosystem of climate change.’

Since the beginning of this year, Luke has been working on a series of paintings based on the experience of travelling by boat along a stretch of the river Ganges. The Ganga paintings draw on the power of this sacred river that flows through the precarious lives of the people and cultures that have thrived throughout history on its banks. His method of working, of gentle mark making, dissolving and erasing gives rise to a mood of reverie. Like watching water, nothing is permanent. ‘Perhaps the only response,’ Luke says, ‘(as one who paints) is to “gather in” the present and recognise that if the current is one of flux and uncertainty it is nevertheless still – in the earth beneath our feet, the ‘weather’ and the sky above - an essential realm of connectedness and embodied experience.’

Currents: new paintings by Julian Bailey, Luke Elwes, Vanessa Gardiner and Janette Kerr RSA Hon is at Sladers Yard, West Bay from 22 September until 11 November 2018.

www.sladersyard.co.uk

Luke Elwes & Jake Elwes 2019

Colin Gleadell review, The Telegraph February 2019

Computer generated artificial intelligence (AI) is having an effect on virtually every human activity in advanced society. But although it permeates the workings of the art market, in research and marketing for instance, it is still in the early stages of development in relation to the making of art.

Last year, Christie’s sold its first example at auction – an algorithmic composite of historic portraits created by Obvious, the Paris collective, for a 45-times estimate of £337,000. Whether this was a case of novelty factor will be tested next month when Sotheby’s offers its first AI work at auction.

Memories of Passersby 1 is two video screens of subtly changing male and female portraits devised by Mario Klingemann, a leading artist, estimated at £30,000 to £40,000.  The AI market, though, is tiny. It has arrived and is unlikely to disappear, but the technical demands of maintenance and operation still worry average art collectors. Most of the creative action is going on beyond the glare of the auction rooms and commercial galleries.

Next month, Jake Elwes, one of the brightest new talents in the AI art firmament, will be acknowledged with a commissioned project at the Zabludowicz Collection in north London. Anita Zabludowicz is one of the leading contemporary art collectors in Britain, known for the admirable way in which she supports and exhibits young artists.

Elwes studied fine art media at the Slade School, where he became the first student to code computer programmes to make art. He had considered studying computer science and philosophy at Oxford but, coming from an artistic background, decided to develop his creative instincts at art school instead.

Luke Elwes, 2018, Paintings from the Ganges at the Frestonian Gallery CREDIT: FRESTONIAN GALLERY

These instincts were probably in his blood. His great grandfather, Simon Elwes, was a go-to society portraitist in the Twenties, much favoured by the Queen Mother. 

Jake’s father, Luke, is a painter too. Starting out with portraits, Luke has since embarked on an intriguing journey as a landscape painter. Eschewing photographic realism, he has captured the essence of places from Bungle Bungle in Australia to, most recently, the River Ganges.

Luke recalls that, at school, Jake struggled because of dyslexia, but developed remarkable computer skills. Slade professor David Burrows says: “Jake was singular in my time in teaching in working with AI. Importantly, he managed to combine his interest in design and AI with an interest in aesthetics to produce engaging work.”

Luke Elwes, 2018, Paintings from the Ganges at the Frestonian Gallery CREDIT: FRESTONIAN GALLERY

At his degree show in 2017, Jake exhibited three videos made entirely by computers that he had programmed or coded. One visitor was Steve Fletcher, who had been running a gallery specialising in new media art. Fletcher says he immediately recognised Elwes’s work as, “exceptional… Not only was the work technically interesting, but it was interesting to look at.

“It showed a deeper understanding of technology than most other artists working with AI, not least because he had done the coding himself and brought an aesthetic sensibility that produced arresting, seductive images. In one piece, Latent Space, for instance, he set the computer up to roam without direction, almost in a dreamlike state.”

Luke Elwes, 2018, Paintings from the Ganges at the Frestonian Gallery CREDIT: FRESTONIAN GALLERY

While their methods are different, Jake’s latest project is not so far removed from his father’s. The family has stayed for many years on the Essex coast, on Osea Island and at Landermere, which are populated in season by migrant birds – curlew, oyster catchers, waders and lapwings. Elwes used machine learning to search for images of these marsh birds.

“The computer didn’t know what a marsh bird was, but it managed to select the most evocative looking, and compiled composite images of them,” says Elwes, who then placed them in the mud and filmed them, projected on a perspex screen, capturing a slow interplay between nature and its artificial relatives.

How much of the end product is the work of algorithms or curated by Elwes may not be easy to tell, which is what makes this kind of AI art special.

Luke Elwes exhibition review 2014

Luke Elwes

Adam Gallery, 67 Mortimer Street, W1 | John Street, Bath, until 28 March | 29 March until 16 April 2014

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.

Andrew Lambirth  29 March 2014

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

Writing on Water 2014

Art review: a watery world

Painter Luke Elwes brings Writing on Water to a central London gallery

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.

Water wasn’t always this artist’s subject. His early years were spent in Iran, where the light and space of the desert were a formative influence. After training as an artist in London, a meeting with the writer Bruce Chatwin took him to the central Australian desert to explore the landscape and its use in aboriginal storytelling and art forms (if you read Chatwin’s book, The Songlines, about how the purpose of aboriginal walkabouts is to retrace traditional paths across ancestral lands, singing old songs handed down through the generations so as to "sing the lands back into existence", you’ll understand the connection).

 From land to water

The water theme came to the fore after 2000, when Elwes started spending a lot of time on Osea Island, off the Essex coast, and watching the interaction of water and land. These days his Essex observation point has moved to some damp if lovely rooms looking out over water a little further down the coast. This is at the top of a former smugglers’ inn on a remote creek that – on good days – is just above water level. Once the holiday home of several members of the Bloomsbury set, the mouldy books on the shelves belong to them. Water is always on visitors’ minds. Boats, many also looking as though they might have been left behind by someone in the Bloomsbury era, lie around outside, with greenish tidelines, and neighbours dropping by as Elwes paints bring stories of the water breaking through such-and-such a defence, or spreading into a new field.

 The current exhibition arose out of a month spent in America, painting in the Green Mountains near Vermont, and, Elwes says, “working each day by the flowing waters and cascading rapids of the Gihon river. It was a month that began in heavy snow and ended with the first signs of spring, as the ice flows slowly dissolved and the rivers rose up with the roar and rush of meltwater.”

“Arriving from London with two large rolls of paper and a few drawing materials I set out to find a way of recording this parcel of time and space by interacting with the river’s alchemy, pacing out the days – sometimes icily cold, sometimes warm and wet as the season changed – with images made both with the water and of the water. Responding to this fluid encounter, as well as to its vibrant sounds, both its pulsing rush and gentle whisper, was a way to reconcile (through marks on paper) the river’s dark mercurial force and glittering surface with the mutating course of its submerged history.”

I went to the exhibition rather hoping that the flimsy nature of the materials might mean that I could afford to buy one of this collection of mixed-media works on paper. (Most of Elwes’ oils are well outside my price bracket these days - I missed my chance to buy one before he became too famous). Sadly that was not to be, and none of the pictures will be coming home with me (though the profusion of red dots suggests they’ll be going somewhere). But they are very lovely, a little frightening, and well worth a look.

The Luke Elwes: Writing on Water exhibition is at the Adam Gallery, 67 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7SE until 28 March, then moves to the Adam Gallery at 13 John Street, Bath from 31 March to 16 April.

By Vanora Bennett  21 March 2014

Compass 2004

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.