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Luke Anderson is a self-taught painter and mixed media artist originally from Cheyenne, Wyoming, now working out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Anderson’s surfaces often incorporate contemporary elements of abstraction and graphic design into the more traditional painterly styles more often associated with western and landscape painting. His subject matter ranges from mountains to deserts to clouds and sunsets, often reducing complex objects to flattened 2-dimensional shapes. Strong senses of depth in space and atmospheric perspective are common visual themes. His work has been exhibited at prominent regional art institutions, including the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming, the Old West Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah, the Coors Western Art Show in Denver, Colorado, and at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana. He has won several awards, including “Best Oil Painting” at the 2020 Western Spirit Art Show & Sale at Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Honorable Mention at the 2020 Annual Salon at Springville Art Museum in Springville, Utah, and the Fine Art Connoisseur Award at the 2022 Coors Western Art Show. His paintings have been featured in the pages of Western Art Collector magazine, Southwest Art Magazine and Big Sky Journal.
My paintings are a celebration of the natural world, our planet, 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 plains, 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.
