Luke Anderson - Introduction

When I first started painting, I was predominantly painting landscapes and cityscapes. It was what the artists that I admired were doing. I was really interested in Monet and the Impressionists and Van Gogh, Wayne Thiebaud, uh, even Bierstadt and some of the Hudson River School. I was surrounded by Western landscapes both where I lived and where my family would travel on road trips. It was what I knew and it was my experience living in this region. And it wasn't until much later, even the last couple years, maybe 2017, that I really discovered that Western art was a genre in itself. Then I discovered the Taoist school and the Canadian Group of Seven artists, and then things really started to come together in terms of making a cohesive vision or understanding of maybe what I wanted to do with my, with my painting. This body of work, I feel like, is a pretty good representation of where I've been and where I've gone and where I'm going. Throughout my career. As I got better as an artist and as a painter, I started doing more works based on wildlife and horses and cowboys and cowgirls and some of the more traditional Western imagery and moved away from the landscape a bit. I was working on this show, it just sort of naturally, I gravitated back towards the landscape, which is where I started and what made me fall in love with painting to begin with. So I really, I feel like I've come full circle, and I think these last, last few paintings I've been working on have sort of embodied or incorporated all, all of the techniques and lessons and concepts I've learned and developed over the past several years working on various different subjects and applying them to landscape. And I've just tried to allow myself to be really free, and this whole process has shown that I have become a little bit more flexible and open to the give and take of the painting process in creating the best work I possibly can. Thanks.