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.

Vision & the Visionary 2023

For the inaugural exhibition of its 2023 programme Frestonian Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of works on paper by Bridget Riley and Luke Elwes. This exhibition is a continuation & development of the exhibition of the same name at the Myung-Won Folk House Museum in Seoul, South Korea, which ran from October to November in 2022, and which juxtaposed Elwes’ and Riley’s work with sculpture by Korean artist Vakki and digital art by Canadian-Korean artist Sammy Lee. 

The Myung-Won exhibition, curated by Stephanie Kim and Kate Lee, saw a cross-section of Riley’s works on paper in gouache and print spanning from 1966-2020 shown opposite and alongside a contemporary selection of works from Elwes’ ongoing ‘Landermere’ series – a body of work that has itself spanned some 15 years – an extraordinary exploration into the qualities of light and atmosphere in a single place (Landermere Wharf in Essex) redolent of Monet’s engagement with the landscape at Giverny in the late 19th and early 20th Century.     

Riley and Elwes were, and are, both heavily influenced by the deconstructive & colour-theory elements of the 19th & 20th Century European Impressionist tradition, whilst having each developed entirely distinct modern / post-modern practices. In keeping with their forebears refined methodologies, their works each follow self-imposed restrictions of expression, yet find infinite variation within them. Riley’s early influence by the Impressionists and Pointillists – in particular Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne – is reflected in her approach to reconstructing and reimagining the natural world in planes of pure colour and line. Her hard-edge form of abstraction is in many ways the opposite to Elwes’ more flowing, expressive and organic painting practice. Just as Riley eliminates all possible chance in the realisation of the final work, Elwes revels in it – allowing the very water that he is depicting to act as a medium in itself and shape the final expression of his densely layered and evocative works. 

Works such as Riley’s ‘Coloured Greys 2 & 3’ (1972), ‘Dominance Red, Green and Blue’ (1977) and ‘Places for Change’ (2009) each freeze in a single crisp moment the wave form, whilst the optical effect of the closely aligned linear planes of colour give the sensation of movement across the surface of the off-white paper grounds. Whereas Riley’s works give us lateral momentum, Elwes’ works provide dimensional depth – drawing the viewer into considering each square foot, indeed each square inch of the work with increasing scrutiny as the various layers of gouache, crayon, pigment and ink reveal themselves in turn. In the work of Elwes and Riley we are thus asked to consider again and again what constitutes a form, a movement and, ultimately, the nature of ‘landscape’ itself.  

Luke Elwes | Landermere 2021

Frestonian Gallery 11 November - 22 December 2021

Consisting solely of works on paper ‘Landermere’ marks Luke Elwes’ second solo exhibition at Frestonian Gallery and the culmination of an extraordinary investigation into a practice that is as meditative as it is dynamic.

For the past two decades, Luke Elwes has alternated his time between his studio in London, mainly working in oil paint, and extended periods out on location making works on paper. Beginning with the Osea series, created over the course of a decade on a small island off the east coast of England, in recent years he has gone on to make significant bodies of work on paper during residencies in the US, at both the Vermont Studio Center and the Albers Foundation in Connecticut.

These latest works on paper, created over the last eighteen months, are centred on a fragile wilderness of salt flats and tidal marshland, the eponymous Landermere, and capture this permeable space and its ever shifting lines between water, earth and sky. They are created in, and reflect, a place which appears tranquil but is also cyclical and endlessly mutating, recalling Heraclitus’ dictum that ‘everything flows and nothing abides’. Each image is begun and completed in one sitting and continued regardless of changes in the weather. They refer both to the immediacy of a single encounter and the recollection of past experience. This distillation of a range of conditions of light, colour and personal physical experience of the landscape calls to mind Cy Twombly’s ‘Four Seasons’ paintings (1993-4) – evocations of a broad and more universal experience, that both reflects and transcends the subject matter.

The process of making these works is one very much of Elwes’ own devising, and something that is being continually explored and perfected – were perfection possible in an exercise where the elements of chance are so integral. Each work begins with a complex web of under-drawing in ink, crayon and graphite before the work is immersed in layers of gouache mixed with tidal water. This solution allows the pigment to float and run as Elwes manipulates the durable Arches paper, forming undulating streams of colour here, or pooled lakes of textured paint there. In this process the entire work becomes the ‘drawing tool’, and the act of painting a highly physical full-body exercise. The point of resolution – the decision as to when a work is ‘finished’ – is made only when the balance between what is veiled and revealed of the ‘original’ drawing feels perfectly in balance.

Situated between the visual field and a mental landscape, these works represent a continual process of excavation - of what is lost or recovered in memory as well as what lies buried or concealed by the tides of time.

Luke Elwes | Passage – Paintings from the Ganges 2019

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

Exhibition Dates – 8th February – 16th March, 2019

Frestonian Gallery is delighted to present a newly completed body of work by Luke Elwes, that takes as its principal source a journey undertaken by the artist along the Ganges River in 2017.

Beginning near Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh and wending along the ever-changing course of perhaps the most venerated river in the modern world, through the holy cities of Varanasi and Gaya (Bihar), Elwes and his small travel party lived entirely on the river, camping alone on newly formed sandbanks and on the edge of the Ganga plain – ending his journey where the Ganges dissipates into the sea in the Sundarbans mangroves of the vast delta feeding into the Bay of Bengal, near Kolkata.

Along this route, taken at a stately pace by the usual modern standards, Elwes worked continuously, recording in sketches and watercolours the quality of the light, its play on the water, the nature of the atmosphere – brisk and full of a sense of the expansive nature of the landscape in the north, then humid and all-enveloping toward the South. Into the materials used for these sketches and paintings Elwes worked traces of water and sediment from the river, as he sought to combine both vision and surface – the object and its manifestation into the ‘living evidence’ that would travel home with him to his studio in London, where the Ganga Series could begin to first settle in his mind’s eye, then arise again as a new creation in itself – both a distillation and an entire reimagining of the journey.

Robert Delaunay, when describing the qualities and distinctiveness of Impressionism, described the movement as ‘...the birth of light in painting’ – and it is this that most resonates within Elwes’ own ties to that tradition of landscape painting. His work and his travels, or rather his experience of the different qualities of light and atmosphere across the globe are completely indivisible. The Australian and Iranian Deserts, the Nepalese Mountains, the quiet mist of the English coast and the solitude of the Atlas Mountains all bear their influence within the continuity of Elwes’ practice as a painter.

The Ganga Series is thus an examination & meditation on both an utterly unique environment and a universal one. The Ganges carries within it an infinitely rich history – named 108 different ways and existing in the minds of a billion souls as a god-form (the personification of ‘Mother Gaṅgā’). It is however the quality of the light and sense of timeless expanse that seems here most affecting to the artist contemplating and approaching it as a subject – albeit with the vast weight of cultural significance there as a steady undercurrent along the river’s 2,500km course.

These new paintings seek to, and succeed in, capturing the extraordinary moments that such a journey invokes. Moments where the surface darkens then shimmers back into life; moments where the water and the sky become completely as one in a delicately bruised haze of pinks and white sunlight. These are what Elwes captures, or rather finds, within a series of paintings in thinned and manipulated oils that at once manage to feel incredibly dense and joyfully light. The finely layered and balanced Ganga Series combines the specificity of the god-river itself, with a sense of the universal quality of being transported by an environment beyond any definite notion of time and place.

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

London Painters in Italy 2017

Gli Amici Pittori Di Londra

Extract from catalogue essay by Catherine Lampert  May 2017

A few months ago, Lino Mannocci organised a dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club in London, creating a rare occasion for collective sociability, and confirmation that the Galleria Ceribelli would host a sequel to ‘Gli amici pittori di Londra’, the exhibition held exactly ten years ago. After the decision to place May 20th in the diary as the opening date, ideas were floated, for example, the insertion of portraits of each other, or self-portraits, into the mix of four pictures each artist would send to Bergamo. This would extend to the three artists no longer living. Greatly admiring Lino’s initiative in making this bridge between artists of such exceptional integrity and between England and Bergamo, I agreed to try to weave words the artists would send into a single text. Although I am familiar with their practices, in only a few cases have I seen the actual pictures, so the collective and singular impressions of what these artists have in common is somewhat invented. When the paragraphs arrived, they reminded me how increasingly private these artists’ lives have become and how intangible their intentions and themes.  The source material is frequently autobiographical and abstracted from lived experience, sometimes this might be a continuation from their previous art, or indeed refer to the art and literature of others... 

... Once artists pass fifty inevitably they are less inclined to spare time to meet, argue and make explicit their ambitions. Efforts are directed to impossible tasks, like Luke Elwes’s ‘Picturing Time’. ‘If the image is grounded in, begins with, a particular place and moment, it is also refracted through the memory of previous encounters. What resurfaces of an experience in paint (that is, registered in the process of walking, travelling or simply “being” in a place) is also informed by – and perhaps inevitably filtered through – the imperfect recollection of previous paintings and encounters. The image exists in the fluid boundaries of past and present, between what is buried and retrieved, and how it resolves in paint on canvas is itself a process of distilling, erasing and recovering layers of time.’

Then he went on to link this statement to his painting Daybreak 2016. ‘What was originally observed and recorded when passing through a seemingly unfamiliar territory has become an exploration not only of my transient presence in the world but also of the restless elemental forces that shape it. The historical record (both of this place and its subsequent representation) becomes unstable as its material residue is subsumed by weather and pigment, with the result that the image appears to be suspended between resolution and dissolution.’

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.

Constellation 2012

Constellation

This new series of works on paper are the result of the fluid interaction of natural and man made materials. They are executed under an open sky, at dawn or dusk, sometimes in the rain or late at night, and they remain close to the ground or the water, where the shifting light radiates across the salt marshes and the tides move back and forth through the delicate maze of creeks and channels. They reveal chance encounters with a myriad of visual stimuli: passing birds, rolling mist, scattered flora, wind blown leaves or drifting shapes, floating on, reflected in, the passing streams. They are a fragile record of process and time, the uncertain result of a particular moment of elemental engagement, made without correction in one sitting. The location provides just a beginning, a way of collecting particles of colour and light and a way of observing the play of prevailing conditions on a paper surface which, once it is scattered with incidental markings and stained with coloured inks and organic matter, is then allowed to become saturated by the surrounding waters.

In an extract from a letter to the artist, Robert Macfarlane writes: ‘ 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.’

Robert Macfarlane is the author of The Wild Places (Granta, 2008) and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin 2012)

'Every painting is a veil, though given that many abstract painters have sought to vanquish the inherent illusionism of the medium, perhaps we should say, potentially so. The paintings shown here are characteristic, in their layering of diluted, stained and poured oil paint. Ostensibly abstract, in the sense that they are flat, dispersed in structure and without figural content, they manifestly suggest liquid, flowing, reflective surfaces. That which they enact, then, they also configure. Elwes has a migrant past, having lived for part of his childhood in Iran, and he is attracted by remote and desert regions. While the desert, in its aridity, might seem the opposite of these apparently liquid formations, there is an underlying affinity between water and sand, and a liaison between both and the wind: sand is formed and moved by the wind, and flows like water, forming waves and ripples. Elwes intends his paintings to form themselves correspondingly, in a microcosmic recapitulation of these natural processes of flow and inundation.'

(Brendan Prendeville, Goldsmiths College; extract on Luke Elwes from ‘Another Country’, an essay for the Estorick Collection, London 2010)

Silent Kingdom 2011

Silent kingdom 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.

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

Another Country, Estorick 2010

ANOTHER COUNTRY: London Painters in dialogue with Italian art

Introductory essay by Brendan Prendeville

Painting knows no frontiers. Of all the arts, it is the most immediate, the most ready of access. Of all the arts, it is the least constrained by cultural difference. Literature is tied to its particular language, music to a set of conventions that bind it within its cultural limits more than is the case with painting. It is in painting that the transforming power of art is most evident, for it can draw on what we might - if we follow Richard Wollheim – regard as a natural and universal human faculty for seeing something as other than it is. Wollheim called it ‘seeing-in’, and Leonardo was the first to describe it when he advised painters that they could stimulate the imagination by looking at stained surfaces and seeing in them whatever scenes they wished. We cannot know what the prehistoric cave paintings at Altamira meant to those who made them, but in so far as we see as they saw, we may see what they saw: animals and men, in traces of coloured pigment. All painting is alike in this respect.

            And yet painting is at the same time the most territorial of the arts, the only one bounded by a perimeter, its very own frontier: its surface, its frame. It is in painting, too, that limes of cultural demarcation have been most evident, often egregiously so: the bias to gender or class. Painting is also, like the other plastic arts, material, concrete and tied to the specific: the materials the cave painters used were of necessity those found locally. It is through its narrowness and particularity, then, that painting opens to the world, and opens up a world. It offers a frontier in order that we should cross it.

            The present exhibition has a transnational theme, and it proposes a dialogue across frontiers. The ten London painters shown here have long sustained a dialogue amongst themselves, feeling affinities, respecting differences – or, rather, responding to the stimulus of difference. They have exhibited together previously, in Italy, and while two of them – Mannocci and di Stefano – are Italian by birth or parentage, the general basis for this present conversation with Italian art has to do not with any such particular connection but rather with a certain commonality of approach, one that makes a group exhibition at the Estorick Collection apposite. Of course, like any artists working today, these painters draw on sources diverse in origin and date, but the common element we might regard as ‘Italian’ may be found in their particular investment in precisely that transformative capacity in painting Wollheim named ‘seeing-in’. Accepting that this potential in painting is universal, we might encapsulate its ‘Italian’ realisation in an aphorism: painting takes us into another country....

            Every painting is a veil, though given that many abstract painters have sought to vanquish the inherent illusionism of the medium, perhaps we should say, potentially so. It is a potential each of these painters accepts, none of them more explicitly than Luke Elwes. The paintings shown here are characteristic, in their layering of diluted, stained and poured oil paint. Ostensibly abstract, in the sense that they are flat, dispersed in structure and without figural content, they manifestly suggest liquid, flowing, reflective surfaces. That which they enact, then, they also configure. Zoran Music, Elwes’s chosen artist, was not Italian by birth, though he did spend most of his working life in Italy, moving just across the border from his native Slovenia to live and work in Venice. There is evident identification here, for Elwes himself has a migrant past, having lived for part of his childhood in Iran, and, like Music, he is attracted by remote and desert regions. While the desert, in its aridity, might seem the opposite of these apparently liquid formations, there is an underlying affinity between water and sand, and a liaison between both and the wind: sand is formed and moved by the wind, and flows like water, forming waves and ripples. Elwes intends his paintings to form themselves correspondingly, in a microcosmic recapitulation of these natural processes of flow and inundation. Beneath Refuge we may see the traces of the free, impulsive drawing over which flow the layers of dilute paint. Each painting has such transparency, with crisscrossing paint flows forming lattices through which appear regular, vertical formations in three of the paintings. In all the paintings, in differing ways, regular elements confine or cut across the liquid flows: either submerged and washed over, or intrusive, like the black vertical in Passage. The limit reveals the unbounded.

Copyright Brendan Prendeville 2010

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

Luke Elwes Paris 2009

LUKE ELWES: PEINTURES RECENTES

GALERIE MARCEAU BASTILLE, PARIS

30 APRIL - 30 SEPTEMBER 2009

In his paintings Luke Elwes explores the landscape of memory. As well as recording particular journeys (to North Africa, Tibet and central America), the paintings reveal, like a hieroglyphic text, the many layers of history buried beneath the surfaces of these places. They become maps of the ‘geographical unconscious’, suggesting both the trail of our presence and the passage of time.  As Odilon Redon put it, they place ‘the logic of the visible in the service of the invisible’.
Luke Elwes exhibits regularly with Art First Contemporary Art in London and New York, as well as, more recently, with Galleria Ceribelli in Bergamo Italy. The paintings in this exhibition have been selected by the artist from the recent Refugia series and it represents the first opportunity to see his recent work in Paris since 2001.

A travers ses peintures Luke Elwes explore le paysage de la mémoire.
Ses œuvres sont la trace des voyages de l’artiste, en Afrique de Nord, au Tibet et en Amérique Centrale. Elles révèlent, tel des Hiéroglyphes, les différentes couches de l’histoire enfouies sous  ces paysages. Chaque  tableau  est une carte de la « géographie inconsciente », il  révèle les traces laissées par notre présence et par le passage du temps.  Selon la citation d’Odilon Redon :« La logique du visible au service de l’invisible »

Luke Elwes vit et travaille à Londres. Il est régulièrement exposé à la Galerie Art First Contemporary Art à Londres et à New-York, ainsi que plus récemment à la Galleria Ceribelli à Bergame en Italie. Les peintures exposées viennent de sa récente série « Refugia ». Elles ont été choisies par L’artiste qui n’a pas exposé à Paris depuis 2001.

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.

Refugia Art First 2007

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)

Flowing Ground 2005

LUKE ELWES: FLOWING GROUND

BROADBENT LONDON   21 JUNE - 23 JULY 2005

This new series has grown out of a twin impulse, the wish to explore the visual field with the most direct means available - minerals, matter, water and paper - and to do it by taking one patch of ground, a small island, and looking at it deeply, again and again, to see what it yields.It is also a private and radical response to a larger problem - namely, how to picture the world and what media to adopt as the most valid vehicle for its exploration?  This question has become more complicated as the range of technical possibilities open to artists both expands and becomes more rapidly obsolete, and as the language and terms of one method - painting, photography, digital media - is infiltrated and overturned by another. 

Painting especially seems to have lost ground in this accelerating process, increasingly prone to critical judgements which signal its demise on one day and its new ‘triumph’ on the next. 
So to return to drawing at this juncture - the impulse that lies at the root of so many visual systems - is also to return to first principles, to start over with the simplest contact between hand and eye, as an unencumbered way to locate and map out the subtle complexities of our response to the transient nature of the seen world.  It is a matter not only of acting, but of receiving.  As my deepening experience of one place - Osea Island in the Blackwater estuary -  is overlayed with new responses, so the need to work directly in the territory I am exploring has grown.  The island has become an extension of the studio, a space where thought, memory and action arise simultaneously.  As this series has grown over the last two years, so the distance between the world outside and the world in the studio has all but vanished.

The island is a contained world, a parcel of earth illuminated by sky and water and shaped by tide and wind.  Its interior is a wilderness that mutates with the seasons, the vibrant buzz and fecund bloom of summer fields disappearing beneath the stark silhouettes and white mists of wintertime;  while at its margins, a potent liminal space arises from the constant tension between liquidity and solidity.  On some days the fractured tracery and meandering lines of its soft boundaries spill outwards into glistening black space;  on others, the water rises up to meet the sky, dissolving the surface into a vast expanse of blue and silver light.  Being there, moving through it, is to become progressively immersed in its elemental rhythms, the drawings  a natural  result of this engagement.  A sheet of paper is worked on - sometimes urgently, sometimes with measured slowness - using pens, crayon, ink and pigment, but also  river water, mud, dust, grass and rain.  The mental picture  instinctively combines with the random event.  The drawing is both a representation of, and an intense submersion in the moment.  It hovers between the thing seen and the sensation evoked.

The marks on the paper slide in and out of recognition, acting both as rapid transcriptions and abstract notations.  They combine near and far, exploring the surface while also touching  the distant space above and beneath it.  The specifics of the visual world are unpicked and reassembled, the resulting images covering a spectrum of possiblities as they arise: some drawings returning to the closely observed,  others drifting through non - specific passages of light and dark, evoking a less tangible space, often less seen than felt.
The drawings mark the beginning of a process but also the process itself.  How they evolve is as much about the materials used and how the medium works on any given day as about a specific visual starting point.  Whether a reflective reacquaintance with familiar ground or an instinctive response to some unexpected stimulus ( a shell, butterfly, blossom), they are about the significance of looking,  remaining alive to the transience and mutability of that act of perception.  They travel not so much widely as deeply, absorbing and probing the natural flow of phenomena and the passage of time.  From the lines, marks and washes emerges a landscape where much of ‘what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ 

Luke Elwes
April 2005

Osea Paintings 2002

LUKE ELWES: THE OSEA PAINTINGS

Chardin might have been speaking for all painters when he said of painting that, "it was an island whose shore I have skirted". In a series of large abstract paintings that emerge directly out of his two-year long investigation of the landscape of Osea island Luke Elwes takes Chardin's evocative metaphor and gives it shimmering new resonances. A few hours' drive from London, Osea's wild, flat marshlands and empty, windswept skies have become for the artist a point of departure and a place of return. Dore Ashton wrote of Robert Motherwell, "He travels abroad and in doing so returns to his own source."

For most of Luke Elwes' artistic career he has travelled and painted. But he is no travel painter. His extensive journeys, and through them his exposure to the culture, beliefs, and landscape of others, 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 the artist's decisive encounter with the desert at the start of the 1990s. After 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 Turkey ­ there is implicit in the new work a sense of homecoming.

The artist's acute observation of the physical world, his preoccupation with the flow of time and matter as it is manifested on Osea, rewards us with canvases suffused with ambient light and the colours of water where it breaks and dissolves into earth. Luke's paintings brim with the luminous silence of an intimacy that approaches awe and derives from a kind of looking that has been described as tenderness towards experience. It is this quality of felt intimacy that draws us so compelling into the paintings' sphere, holds and instructs us there.

In the summer of 2002 Luke will continue his investigation of islands when he visits a wild, coniferous-forested granite island off Maine's rugged coast. Ospreys are the guardians of this far-flung piece of wilderness. Osea and Osprey Islands will both feature in Luke's first exhibition with Art First New York in October 2002.

Clare Cooper and Fiona Donnelly

ART FIRST LONDON 10 APRIL - 9 MAY 2002

ART FIRST NEW YORK 16 OCTOBER - 15 NOVEMBER 2002

Sanctuary 2000

Luke Elwes: Sanctuary

“When we enter the landscape to learn something we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one long observation a fully dilated experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more then we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language.” - Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America

Art is first of all a question of private passions, passions that only finally, connect with a wider audience through the sensuous instincts of the artist. For Luke Elwes, over the last decade, that obsession has been with the sacred landscape. His journeys to the dry tablelands of the Hopi Indians in New Mexico, the Central Australian Desert of the Australian Aborigines, the Great Rift Valley in East Africa (the first landscape consciously known to human eyes) and, more recently, to the Buddhist sacred mountain, Mt. Kailash in the Tibetan Plateau, are all part of an intense need to confront and give form to the inner loneliness of our existence – those same “desert places” that so haunted the imagination of the poet Robert Frost. And, on each of these journeys it has been the quietness and steadiness of his attention to the landscape, his willingness to let the complex language of the land shape his experience of it, that has resulted in such a consistently rich and rewarding body of paintings over this period.

Yet, it should be stressed, it has also been part of an intelligent conversation, one to which Elwes has, in the most open-minded way, brought both his own knowledge as well as a desire to understand. The resulting paintings have not been driven by an overriding desire for a new form that the landscape might provide, but on the contrary have led to the discovery of the physical and spiritual correspondences between apparently diverse geographies. In this new series, derived from his latest journey to the astonishing cave complexes of Cappadocia in Central Turkey that gave home, and literally shelter and protection to the very earliest Christian communities, Elwes has produced paintings that bear close kinship with the work in his Storyline exhibition some seven years ago, which resulted from his travels among the American Pueblo Indians and in the East African Rift Valley.

This is immediately apparent above all in the dark hard edged rectangular openings that form such a dominant visual element of both groups of paintings and landscapes. On the one hand is the similarly punctuated surface, in the Cappadocian paintings representing the apertures hewn out of the rock itself, and marking the entrances to the countless literal spaces of the hermetic cells, chapels and tombs of the Early Christian fathers that honeycomb these extraordinary rock formations. On the other is the remarkable spiritual/geographical coincidence of their east facing entrances, so constructed by the Pueblo Indians that they might “watch the sun being reborn out of the earth’s womb each day, bringing light and lifeback to the silent skin of the earth”. Geologically remarkable in themselves, quite apart from these moving outward evidences of human belief that seem at times almost to float across their surfaces, they are too, as Elwes himself observes, visual metaphors, “suggestive both of individual lives and the connectedness of all Life”.

And, like the landscape of Mt. Kailash in Tibet which provided the inspiration for his last exhibition (Pilgrim, 1998 Art First), this is a landscape filled with visual reminders of belief. “The scenery of early Christendom lay all around us”, Patrick Leigh Fermor observed of Cappadocia, although in its long abandoned and distinctly melancholy uninhabited present state this once populous landscape is not one of continuing belief but instead a potent reminder of an existence and belief largely lost, as our Western/Christian civilisation has become more complex and less innocent. This was very much part of what attracted and absorbed Elwes’ attention. Also the strong sense, nonetheless, that the life and belief that existed in these peaks and valleys was always rooted firmly in the earth, a fact forcibly brought home to him one day when, walking by one of the streams that feed the lush valleys that once provided the hermits’ livelihood, a strange clattering noise in the grass brought him to a group of rutting male tortoises, the descendants of those painted 1500 years earlier and still to be seen decorating cell and chapel walls alongside images of the cross and stars in the sky. As the artist observes, “even the doves stillcircle and return to innumerable dovecotes. The simple wonder of being at one with the earth, the sky, the rocks, the seasons, with all of life, has faded”.

That sense he has of a faith deeply bound to the earth feels unfamiliar in the context of a Christian/Western belief that has, in the intervening period, intentionally distanced itself from what it sees as pagan, naturebound cults, and depicted the earth as of little or no importance spiritually. This tendency has had disastrous consequences, environmentally and emotionally for the human race as a whole as we simultaneously destroy the earth and lose our sense of place within it. For, as Paul Devereux has written in Revisioning the Earth, “Place is not passive. It interacts with our consciousness in a dynamic way. It contains its own memory of events and its own mythic nature, its ‘genius loci’ or spirit of place”. It can bring things to the fore, into awareness, that were until then existing in the unconscious mind. Place can therefore illuminate us and provide mythic imaginings within us”.

All this might sound like a heavy agenda to superimpose on these paintings, and it is a measure of Elwes’ subtlety and command as a painter now that he can find so surely the technical ways and means to translate these apprehensions into a series of visual images that are at the same time direct and yet resonant with feeling. Beneath the great washes of colour that drift across some of the large canvases one senses, unmistakably, the traces and gleamings of the decorations that fill the walls of those underground/overground chapels, while the layers of paint surface upon paint surface in themselves provide a potent metaphor for the tantalising, obscuring effects of time and history on our understanding. They suggest too.the layering of memory. The poet Kathleen Raine complaining of our present education as “a language without a memory”, observed that “the language of poets is a language of images upon which meanings are built, in metaphors and symbols which never lose their link with light and darkness, tree and flower, animals and rivers and mountains and stars and winds and the elements of earth, air, fire and water. The language of poetry in the language of nature”. In a culture that is becoming increasingly amnesiac, our attention spans ever shorter, these paintings have the effect of engaging our attention with that same quality of quietude and passion that Luke Elwes first experienced in the Cappadocia landscapes.

Nicholas Usherwood
February 2000

Pilgrim 1998

Luke Elwes: Psychological Geodesist

As a boy I used to look of maps, / was … obsessed with maps, the white areas most of all. They denote those places of which we know nothing, dark spots in the universe that exert a… savage attraction. That is why / went to sea. / had to visit those places. So one travels and travels, through Asia, through South America, up the river Congo, and it is… it is … a journey into one’s self, the drawing up of a vast mop. One becomes a …psychological geodesist.  Journey into a Dark Heart by Peter Hoeg

Geodesy is earth measurement on a large scale, or surveying with allowance for the earth’s curvature. It seems to me that this is what Luke Elwes does – in both literal terms, and in a more personal, metaphorical but generally accessible way. His principal subject is landscape and our relationship with it, our journey through it, our response to it. Elwes has spent much of his painting career exploring alternative ways of looking at the world, and of how to depict the experience of being in it. Man within the universe, rather than controller of it. His new paintings are meditative and calm, conjuring an arena of dreamy speculation: they proffer the refuge of silence in a cluttered, hectic world.

Luke Elwes spent his earliest years in Tehran and grew up in the luminous spaces and under the big skies of Persia. Later, living in Britain, when he came to paint landscape it was a natural progression to move from the softness of Connemara and Wessex to the greater aridity of Spain, before he succumbed to the lure of the desert. (“The desert is the purest landscape, where the soul breathes; the place where we first came to touch the surface, and sense the forces moving beneath it.” Elwes 1991 .) His Australian paintings were fed by the example of the Aboriginal desert artists, by the writings of Bruce Chatwin, and by an awareness of two modern painters – Fred Williams and Alan Davie. But this group of pictures nevertheless remains an individual and remarkable contemporary response to journeying in the wilderness. Elwes confronted himself as much as the unfamiliar landscape, and recorded their dynamic interaction.

Why the desert? Not just for its purity, though very great is the need to escape the trappings of civilisation in order to think. Humanity has hardly left a mark on the shifting sands of the Sahara, yet nature is still very much in evidence. At night, or after rainfall, a whole host of plants and animals appear as if by magic. Beneath the apparently dead surface of the sand, the pulse of life continues unabated. All is there in potential. And it’s a refreshing alternative to the man-dominated environment. Elwes has wandered through the dry tablelands of New Mexico observing the Hopi Indians, he has visited the Chalbi desert and the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, which was probably the first landscape to register on human eyes. In his desire to see the world and our relationship with it afresh, Elwes is drawn ineluctably to first things and to last things – to the elemental.

What luck then to be invited at the end of 1996 to join an expedition to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar on the high Tibetan plateau. This is one of the world’s most sacred places, and, like Delphi, is thought to be the centre of the world, its omphalos, or navel. Mount Kailash is identified in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology as the World Pillar and the Pathway to the Stars. The mountain is also identified as the abode of Shiva, from whose hair the life-giving waters of the Ganges descend to earth. Meanwhile Lake Manasarovar, known to the Buddhists as the “green-gemmed mandala”, is believed to have sprung from the mind of the Brahma. A sacred site, inaccessible and isolated, but the focus of concerted pilgrimage; such is the potency of the place that to walk a single circuit of the mountain is said to be sufficient to erase the sins of a lifetime. The circular route is a month’s pilgrimage. Elwes speaks of the redemptive powers of the magic mountain. It is a 50 kilometre walk around the base (only Buddha ever went up the mountain itself), and not everyone who undertakes it can complete the course. Material offerings, or ex votos, are scattered over the foothills and blown about, making it look a little like a rubbish dump. (The profane has its place in the scheme of things.) The way is strewn with carved and inscribed stones to mark the passage of previous pilgrims. To Elwes, sensitive as he is to the genius loci or spirit of place, it was like being on the roof of the world, with the sky close enough to touch.

Elwes took the unusual experience of the pilgrimage as a spur to his previous ideas, as a way of deepening his own enquiry. The mountain itself doesn’t feature in this series of new pictures. True there’s a small study of an idealised mountain shape, but aside from that, it is an unseen though pervasive presence. The holy river valley is on the other hand a favourite motif. The river’s source is at the base of Mount Kailash, and its flood forms a beautiful turquoise thread of water down the valley. Elwes, for the sake of pictorial and spiritual simplicity, in Fall, reduces the river to a ribbon of blue, intermittent on the canvas. This resembles the cut-outs or arabesques of Matisse, but also the prayer flags or paper prayers drifting on the wind around the holy mountain. As Matissean marks it exists as a flat pattern floating on the surface of the canvas. As a depiction, however schematised, of the descent of a river, it works within the picture space. The strength of it is that it can and does have both functions.

On the trek, Elwes made colour notations and naturalistic sketches in watercolour, as well as taking photographs. Back in his North London studio he picked up the traces of his previous work and sought to incorporate his newly-garnered information. Again, external influences played their part in the generation of new images. Elwes had been looking at the great waterfalls in Hiroshige’s prints, and the economic way the Japanese artist captures the sheer drop of water. (Interestingly, it appears often like a column.) Once again, simple shapes. Elwes had already begun to experiment with layered surfaces fractured like fretwork, the patina crisply broken-up into tiny windows, here and there revealing hidden depths excavated. He began to take this technique further. He might commence by scribbling across the surface of the canvas, making marks almost like automatic writing. Various layers of underpainting and undermarking would then be covered up by a thin wash of paint. This again might be partly removed by running turps over the new surface. It’s difficult to predict quite what will happen when another wash is flooded over the canvas, or even trickled on. The possibility of losing the surface altogether, clogging up the tooth of the canvas, simply by running too many washes over it, is an essential part of the process – it’s the yeast of risk. In these new paintings, Elwes achieves thinner surfaces than before and yet more complex layering; despite the aleatory nature of this part of his practice, he has grown increasingly adept in its manipulation.

Chords and echoes sound through the work as a whole. Certain themes recur. In 1992, Elwes, an acute commentator and historian of his own work, wrote: ‘In these paintings, two images have emerged, the meandering line and the divided surface. 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.” To take a specific example, the 1992 painting entitled Source displays profound kinship to Skin of five years later. There is a recognisable continuity of interests, combined with unflagging technical exploration. The group of paintings which feature a globe (see Arc, Navel, Roof and Breath) take a longer perspective on the same issues. Whether they refer to molecular, bodily or global structure, their analytical/emotional thrust is constant. The surfaces are even further worked, densely explored but not fussily. If we decide to interpret the image as a map, the scatterings of fields and dwellings should also be read simply as mark-making. The pictures are just as much about abstract ideas: divisions, boundaries, the edges of things. One of the key aspects of this group is a balance of power played out between light and dark. The arc of darkness encroaches on the lighted world, or the fruitful belly of the earth squashes night into a corner.

Elwes likes to keep his references multiple. He told me, for example, that Aboriginal desert paintings are also family trees. This is an important back-echo to the work, a formative influence. Likewise, there is the medieval belief that the earth was flat, that you could fall over the edge of it, and that the celestial canopy which was the sky, was held up on poles at its four corners. The stars were the holes in the canopy. For Elwes’ pictures, this is an important point of reference. Again, look to the maps made long ago, with their assumptions of knowledge and their admissions of ignorance. Perhaps with their inventions and blank areas (terra incognita) they were more humanly truthful than anything we can attempt today with our far superior technological resources. (We who can’t see the wood for the trees.)

These 4 foot by 8 foot canvases are the largest that Elwes has worked on. The double square format provides an appropriate horizontal spread for the journey and its alternative routes, though the first of the group, Navel is in fact vertical. A friend looked at it and said that it reminded her of what it felt like to be pregnant. Interestingly, Elwes is not only mapping space, but also the passage of time. The map-points and references have various layers of meaning. At sporadic intervals in the net of veining, branching lines (everything is connected) a cross appears. Is this a kind of hallmark or stamp of approval? (A sign of spiritual weight?) Crosses also simply mark unspecified points of importance on the map. Yet at every crossroads there is choice, and the possibility of new spiritual horizons. This is important. These are paintings which are both map or aerial view, and yet also suggest a horizon line. Now the focus has pulled out, and we see the earth from afar, as if from a satellite in space, yet the detailing is often distinct. Near and far are reconciled. The map floats in and out of focus at the margins, and then comes into clarity at the centre, just as the eye sees. The blue all-seeing metaphoric eye of the holy lake in Skin appears to be both navel and nipple, the circular journey around it tracing the aureola. The pinky-ochre desert of Tibet seems very like the actual derma (in animal terms) of the earth. In the same way rocks can become flesh.

Elwes is attempting to deal with the unseen. As from any patterning, however random (even damp stains on a wall), figurative images will emerge, so here and there a profile face materialises from the map lines. There are many fine shades to meaning, and a range of truths not immediately perceptible. Many fine shades to meaning, and a range of truths not immediately perceptible. Meditation on the pure yet ambiguous forms of Elwes’ paintings may reveal more. (Remark the benignant smile of Strand.) As Redon put it: “The logic of the visible in the service of the invisible.” These paintings also have the character of a palimpsest – an ancient document, that has had many stories written over it, some of which are partially erased, and others more legible. In the simple yet complex new paintings of Luke Elwes lie both stimulus and refreshment for the soul.

Andrew Lambirth (catalogue text for Pilgrim, Art First 1998)