Jonathan Luke
Jonathan Luke is a multimedia artist living and working in both the Far North of Scotland and
Wimbledon - the main fuel for his work undoubtedly though comes from East Sutherland and its coast. Initially from a traditional Fine Art background, but with the completion of a Foundation Course at the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2010 his artwork took a directional change.
At first sight much of his work could be characterised as geometric abstraction with traces of
representation, but closer observation indicates something else going on. The painted work is often prepared with the canvas laid directly against the wall. This allows and encourages vigorous paint application and sometimes crude mark-making. On occasions the paint is then sanded back against the rough studio wall through paint layers and “dirty” glazes added, before being mounted onto stretcher bars, leaving a distressed, tangibly satisfying quality. The lead colour in the artwork is frequently a cool blue, cobalt, complementing the key focuses for the work of balance, colour and colour adjacencies.
In autumn 2013 a major solo exhibition with 54 artworks was held in Moscow at the Russian
Academy of Arts (in conjunction with the Moscow Museum of Modern Art) entitled Blue Silence. The title was derived from a definition by Professor Colum Kenny who said “..it is the silence that is found out of doors, sometimes during simple services on shipboard, faraway at sea…for this deep blue is the creative silence in the world of thought”. The simple label Blue Silence continues to be evident in much of Jonathan Luke’s work.