
2024 Small Works Show artist Luke Anderson
Luke is a self-taught oil painter originally from Cheyenne, Wyoming and now living and working in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has shown work at museums and acclaimed exhibitions, including the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming, the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah, the Coors Western Art Show in Denver, Colorado, and the Quest for the West at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana. He won the award for best oil painting at the Western Spirit Show at the 2020 Old West Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Fine Art Connoisseur award at the 2022 Coors Western Art Show. His paintings have been featured in the pages of Big Sky Journal and Western Art Collector Magazine. He is represented by Visions West Contemporary Gallery in Bozeman, Montana, Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, Colorado, and Gallery Wild in Jackson, Wyoming and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
My paintings are a celebration of the natural world and of the immense beauty that surrounds us everywhere, from the deepest canyon to the clouds above and everything in between. Growing up on the dry, windswept plains of Wyoming instilled in me an appreciation for big skies, towering thunderstorms, open spaces, pronghorn antelope and golden eagles, and so much more. The sublime nature of the imposing landscapes and monumental weather of our grasslands, deserts, and mountains have always provided me with an opportunity to reflect on my own humanity and place in the world. The west offers an awesome variety of landscapes and environments unlike anywhere else in the world, and I am moved to try and see and interpret as much of it as I can, from the most iconic ancient geological landmarks to the most fleeting cloudscape captured above my head on a random day.
The scenes I paint are usually (but not always) based on real places from images captured with my camera, but the nature of the creative process from start to finish introduces a significant level of alteration and distortion so that the final image is not a copy of reality but merely a reflection or synthesis of it. My aesthetic language has roots in principles of minimalism, abstraction, and simplification. I have drawn inspiration from multiple historical and contemporary art movements and styles, with a stronger emphasis on many of the sub-genres of the broader Modernist art movement, such as Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Fauvism, and Primitivism/Cubism. I am also inspired by commercial graphic design and illustration and various forms of printmaking. I have always had an affinity for antiques and vintage materials like wood, leather, iron, clay, paper and posters. These high quality, long-lasting materials become more beautiful the more they show their age. I try to imbue that sense of durability, age, and timelessness in the finished surfaces of my paintings. I want them to be reminiscent of a Polaroid or old photograph – images that remind us of places we’ve experienced in the past that live on in our memories in a slightly hazy and imperfect form. My pieces have a prominently contemporary design coupled with an elegantly aged feeling to the surface quality, creating paintings that seem to bridge eras in time.
Artist Statement
Luke Anderson