The Water Diaries

 'The Water Diaries' 2000 - 2013, now showing at the Young Gallery Salisbury, is the first museum survey of my work on paper from the last decade and includes a new series made during a recent residency at the Vermont Studio Center USA. Exhibition dates: 1 - 26 October 2013. Young Gallery, Market Place, Salisbury SP1 1BL. UK

For over a decade now Luke Elwes has been recording his experience of the natural world on paper.  The resulting images conjure up a particular space where land and water meet, where the shifting light radiates across the salt marshes and where 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.

Each one was made under the open sky on a single day, often at dawn or dusk and sometimes in the rain or late at night, and the prevailing conditions are mirrored in the drawing, in the way it succumbs to a sea breeze, an enveloping mist, or a sudden downpour. Pigment dissolves, runs and dries in unforeseen ways (and with unexpected results) as the paper’s surface becomes rain spattered, mud flecked, or softened by the rising waters. And each time the resulting image belongs as much to the elements as to the artist who began it.

The artist in Vermont 2013