Luke Stones / About
I’m a Nottinghamshire based artist who predominantly works within the medium of paint. I’ve just recently graduated from a Fine Art degree at De Montfort University in Leicester.
My work deals with space and atmosphere. I create illusionary three dimensional spaces within the confines of a two dimensional canvas. The paintings offer contrasts, in terms of what the viewer sees and feels. The work plays on the viewer and creates a struggle as to what they consider to be actual space. The audience is made to feel like they could step inside the void but at the same time they are repressed by an unknown aspect of the painting. Offering an organic contradiction throughout all aspects of the paintings makeup.
Compositionally the paintings force the idea of a labyrinth style framework. There’s a constant wondering of what’s behind the highly dominating structures. The background sets the scene as an eternal vastness with the shapes almost invading the soft surroundings. This makes the scale of the architectural forms very hard to depict. The shapes themselves are taken from our everyday life, dimensions of a room, and angles of walls. Everything that delivers three dimensions within the real world is transformed into a metaphorical void within the canvas, providing spatial depth within a two dimensional form.
The surfaces of the structures are also used to show deepness. I use a process of layering to push this idea. By using acrylic paint, paint-stripper, inks and bleach I am able to create a controlled derelict surface which provides great distance within the work. This vastness is almost immediately presented with flecks of flatness that manifest themselves throughout the tone of the structure, but shading occurs within the forms which sculpt the three dimensional shapes. Therefore the audience is being offered choices as to what they believe to be space and what is flatness.
This particular body of work involves many shades of the colour blue. The different tones of blue allow maximum spatial depth within the structures. By treating the field of blue’s a layer at a time and while they are wet I am able to create a translucent velvet curtain that allows the viewer to feel like they could be transported through the structure. At the same time the lighter colours such as the ivories and the rustic oranges within the structures burn back from underneath the surface and present the viewer with a flat plane. Making the cold and warm palettes interact with each other emphasising the two conflicting feelings brought out in the viewer.
Incorporated within the body of work there are many influences that have aided my thought process and helped sculpt the progression. Such references include Gerhard Richter, Nigel Cooke, Luc Tuymons, Patrick Caulfield, Hughie O’Donoghue, Robert Polidori, John Serra and James Turrell. Each artist possesses an element within their own work that fuses with ideas of my own, culminating into my own body of work.