Luke Watson
Luke Watson grew up exploring the diverse ecologies of the western United States from his hometown of Salt Lake City. An early interest in drawing and painting led him east to receive a B.F.A. in painting from Pratt Institute. The draw of the deserts and mountains brought him west again shortly after, and his paintings have enjoyed endless inspiration. While continuing to maintain a studio practice, he worked various jobs in production and carpentry in Oregon, Utah, and then Arizona, where he decided to reattend school to pursue art more intensely and cultivate an interest in art education. He now holds an M.F.A. from Arizona State University and lives in Phoenix, teaching art at the community college while continuing to deepen his relationship with the southwest deserts through art, painting, and exploration.
Artist Statement
"I grew up exploring Utah’s high alpine lakes, snow-covered peaks, alpine forests, towering mesas, and twisted red-desert hoodoos with a plein air paint box and a desire to look and experience. Spending time in these wild places nurtured a devout spirituality for the land. The more I watch the world, the more it becomes apparent that life is in the process of becoming something else. This change can happen in rapid copying-division, mutation, the blending of subtly divergent genetic material on microscopic levels, or in the imperceptible digestion of stone by lichens, wind, water, and patience. No matter the size or timescale, processes of change imbue all things with life. I have watched developments trespass into places I imagined were invulnerable to human progress. Seeing one type of life succeed at the cost of so many others is painful. Observing diverse ecologies try their best to change and adapt to new variables, it became evident to me that there is no individual without a complex relation to the entire web of change and there is no life without interaction.
My focus shifted from depicting the world around me to interpreting my place within it. I began to utilize colored paper and traditional representational painting to craft and document a copy of the landscape. I hand build models of trees and other phototrophic organisms out of paper, sculpting and reconstituting their pulped essence into a proxy for their original form. Arranging these symbols of plant life, I develop a reproduction of the landscapes I cherish from materials extracted through its desecration. The hyper-saturated colors I use, as well as the untextured planar facets of the trees, evoke the digital lenses regularly used to consume and fetishize nature through, something to be looked at rather than exist within. By stripping the chaos of actual life from my landscapes, the forest becomes inhospitable and sterile despite its rich seductive depiction, raising questions of the priorities we hold on how the land is viewed, experienced, and utilized. My painting is the documentation of a forest in an utterly unnatural state. Paper cellulose, extracted from the nutrient and energy cycles, is stabilized from change, stabilized from life. Crafted into a static approximation, my paper forests are memorialized through vibrant paintings, a likeness that grows out of a compression of many hours spent looking at a lifeless land of my own creation. Once documented into a painting, the trees are then reconstituted into a sculpture or installation setting where their paper husks are allowed or forced to decompose back into the lifecycle their essence was pulled from. My painting and sculpture call attention to how we have crafted and cultured ourselves out of nature, achieving many things and losing many along the way. Watching the paper forests decompose in my studio, turning into something else, I find myself constantly asking the question 'where do we go from here?'"
Recent Work and Exhibitions:
Luke Watson's paintings and installations are deeply rooted in his experience with the land, capturing landscapes that explore the intersection of nature, memory, and change. His work has been exhibited in various shows, exploring the role of humans within the larger ecological systems of the world.
https://www.lukebwatson.com/
Can you describe the core themes and emotions you explore in your current body of work?
The paintings I am currently creating represent moments of pause, reflecting on and reinterpreting landscapes through memory. Like a scenic view inviting introspection, my paintings capture the essence of a place and the experiences held within them. Each piece distills hours of work into a single, symbolic view, blending reality with reflection.
How does your creative process unfold from concept to completion?
Looking and listening to the world around me is always my first step. The process as a whole involves refining, condensing observations, and then letting those concepts regrow. I follow tangents of interest, learning about the ecology, specific creatures or plants, geology, and histories. These tangents deepen my understanding and appreciation for a place, laying a foundation for the content of a piece. From there, it becomes a studio-based project of recreating that place on canvas. I occasionally use photos early in the drawing stage if specificity is important, but generally, I rely on plein air paintings, memory, and building models or dioramas for reference. After an initial layer of blocking-in is complete, I then lean more heavily on abstract paint qualities and shapes, preferring to foster a sense of feeling and mood of how I remember a landscape rather than focusing on visual description or accuracy.
What inspires you most outside of the visual arts, and how does it influence your work?
Outside of visual art, the outdoors is a big draw for me. Hiking, biking, and camping have always been a significant part of my life. They not only provide me with endless inspiration for painting but also offer social, spiritual, and emotional satisfaction. Gardening, as well, allows me to interact routinely with the same patch of earth and plants, watching how things grow and change. This is inspiring and affects everything from how I compose a piece to the brushwork itself. Other forms of creative expression, such as woodworking, carpentry, playing guitar, and sewing, act as a break from painting while still engaging creativity. They help me when I’m feeling burnt out in the studio but don’t disrupt my creative mindset and inevitably bring new skills and inspiration into the studio.
How do you navigate the balance between personal expression and the commercial aspects of your career?
When balancing the commercial aspect of art with my studio practice, I try to maintain space for commercial concerns without sacrificing much personal expression. It is helpful that the medium I prefer, painting, is one of the more sellable mediums in art. Commercial concerns do come into the studio, mostly in terms of scale. I love making large works that are costly to store and harder to sell, so I try to ensure I am always working on a range of sizes. Apart from that, I also tend to favor creating a painting that fits into a body of work rather than a one-off, but I still believe experimenting is important, so I don’t limit myself entirely there. I also think I would blend sculptural elements into bodies of work more often if the commercial aspect, as well as studio space, was not a concern. In terms of balancing time, I would rather be in the studio, but I always try to maintain a constant pursuit of opportunity, making sure to dedicate enough time each month to search for and apply for shows, publications, residencies, and other opportunities.
What message or feeling do you hope viewers take away from experiencing your art?
The hope for how a piece of art is received is always layered and nuanced. For me, the most immediate response I hope for is enjoyment and wonder, similar to what a real landscape can evoke. I hope these more basic pleasurable emotions can engage a viewer to continue looking and contemplating the piece, serving as an entry point to consider deeper meanings. I hope this leads to reflection upon their own experiences and views of the land as they write their own memories into the space I have created. I aim to create a place for reflecting on the complexity of the ecosystems we inhabit and how we are just a small—if influential—part of the whole. It is crucial to honor this if we want to keep enjoying these spaces. I often try to evoke some level of strangeness or otherworldliness, not to alienate the viewer but to remind them that the full extent of our world and its ecosystems are not fully knowable. We need to appreciate that there will always be mysteries in the land that we must respect before considering altering or controlling them.
