Contemporary landscape Painter: Luke Knight

Selected works available at Whitewater Gallery Polzeath:
https://whitewatergallery.co.uk/artis...

https://www.lukeknightpaintings.com

Up close and personal - a behind the scenes glimpse of a contemporary Cornish painter at work in his studio and out in the field in Cornwall. Get to know more about Luke Knight's painting practice - his motivations and techniques. Luke grew up in Cornwall and has been surfing since he was eleven. He takes huge inspiration from the Cornish sea and landscapes in his beautiful paintings.

Much of Luke's work is created on a robust board – which allows for his very physical approach to painting. He uses paint sculpturally, wrestling to create built texture, reflecting the skies and cliffs. He plays with surface, negative space and reflective areas of calm to balance the scapes – always looking to find places of quiet beauty amongst the chaos. Luke's work is created from memories and loose sketches rather than photographs so as he tries to capture his landscapes, he paints, reworks, sands, lacquers, strips, scrapes, then works and reworks, loses then finds and works back into each painting, crafting each one into a representation of a memory of a memory of what was.

There are times where you will glimpse something or that something will be passing or you are within a moment and there is an essence or a part of that, that you are not trying to capture in the painting but it just informs it.

Growing up in Cornwall, I always lived in Cornwall, started surfing when I was probably eleven, eleven-twelve; so lucky to have the beaches on our doorstep. To be able to make use of them in the summer and in the winter.

Love the physicality of paint and I love the way paint can take on so many forms, it can be loose, it can be thick, it can be sticky it can be dry, it can be wet, it can be glossy it can be matt. It is just the play with all those textures. I compare it to the sea in many ways, I love the way the sea can take on so many forms it can be dead flat and calm and pristine, or it can be angry, the sea can be warm, it can be cold, it can be fresh, in the winter when you in the water it seems to be thicker and it seems to hit harder but in the summer it seems to be lighter.

I think a part of the painting and almost painting is the wrong word because whilst you are applying paint a lot of the process is about sanding, polishing and rubbing and stuff that isn't necessarily applying paint with a paintbrush. A lot of that I like to think is similar to the sea washing up and eroding and polishing; when you go to the same beach throughout the year you will notice after the winter, when there have been lots of storms the sand is all different, and the sandbanks are different, in the summer it kind of flattens out and you get these lagoons and stuff, the swell picks up again in the autumn and it all changes, the sand is constantly shifting around the same beach, whilst it is always the same it is different every time.

If you are stuck in the studio and you are losing your inspiration, get in the sea, just go out get in the water and go for a swim, feel revitalises and empowered, it is magic, you could have had a terrible day, you could have had a great day or all sorts of things can be happening but when you get in the water or in the sea; it is just a bit more removed. Catching a wave and surfing it is very in the moment stuff and if you do have worries that are that much more distant, whenever you get out of the sea you always feel much better