Luke King-Salter

The purpose of my work is to communicate thoughts and feelings that are difficult to express in words. Abstract painting is especially suited to this challenge because, like music and poetry, it has an immediate expressive force capable of bypassing habitual ways of thinking and feeling. 

The experience of nature is central to my imagery. I take my motto from Cezanne: Art is a harmony parallel with nature.' But I have no fixed style and avoid repetition. Each of my paintings is recognizably my own, but it is also an experiment dictated by its particular subject matter. I do not try to conceal the effort that goes into producing them: as the modernists understood, every honest attempt to find an adequate form for something new, difficult, or unfamiliar will be somewhat awkward.

 

As a matter of principle, I avoid working within my own comfort zone. Nevertheless, there is always a quiet lyricism in my work, despite its complexity, and an abiding belief in the unique meaningfulness of beautiful forms.

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Human culture is a cumulative process. Learning to understand, assimilate, and creatively renew the work of others has always been vital to the development of art and ideas. To that end, my paintings often 'illustrate' various historical and contemporary sources of inspiration—usually poems, novels and pieces of music. Because they are abstract, this is not so different from a composer taking a poem and setting it to music to create a song—in both cases, an existing work of art is assimilated into an abstract medium of sound or, in my case, colour. When different art-forms interact, they all benefit and become more meaningful.

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Biography

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I grew up in two very different rural environments: in Pembrokeshire, West Wales and on the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. From the proximity of nature in both places I acquired a taste for wilderness, which is evident in the organic- and landscape-forms of my paintings, as well as their intractability and complexity. I studied philosophy and anthropology in Australia and England, before completing a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2020. This formed the basis of my continuing interest in the history of ideas, and my desire to create art that is historically engaged and engaging.

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