About Luke

Hello, welcome and thank you for stopping by!

Before Art -

The timeline of my life within the art world has many large holes, mainly Emmental shaped, that I have only recently started to fill. I studied BA Illustration at the University of the West of England in the early 2000s and left university to teach English. After having taught for 6 years, my direction took a complete U-turn after reading 'The Last Food of England' by Marwood Yeatman. The book focused on salting, curing and the natural preserving of food in years gone by before refrigeration, and my attention turned to the world of microbiology, with a keen interest (soon to become obsession) in the bacterial comings and goings within fermented food. I wanted to know why raw vegetables, milk or meat, after curing, became so utterly delicious in the forms of sauerkraut, cheese and salami so I started making them at home. My parents bought me a cheese making kit for Christmas and with a plethora of moulds, yeasts and lactic acid bacteria included, I was soon hooked. For the succeeding 12 years I immersed myself in all things cheese related. I sold cheese in a shop in central London, made cheese around the UK, studied the microbiology of cheese-making and eventually set up my own cheese shop, wholesale business and restaurant in Cape Town, South Africa, where I settled with my then pregnant wife Jessica in 2013.

Art -

During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, like many parents (myself of 3 small kids at the time) I was stuck in an ever increasingly messy house during a hard lock-down, doing a not too great job of trying to home school the children. Having recently purchased an iPad that had the Procreate app for digital art on it, I decided to play around seeing as I had no art materials of my own and art materials meant even more mess. The year leading up to this, I had, for reasons unbeknown to myself at the time but have subsequently become extremely thankful for, decided to start a collection of inspiring imagery and paintings in a file on my phone. The collection soon grew to over 1000 images. It was time to stop collecting and start creating. I set up @lukewilliamsart Instagram page and posted some digital imagery with no intention to necessarily pursue. Soon I was receiving messages from people asking for prints! I had no idea how to print images professionally and had never sold any form of artwork in my life. With the hard lock-down over, the urge to create paintings with actual paint grew larger and larger and so, I rented a tiny studio in the city bowl, bought some paints and started painting. I haven't stopped painting since.

Inspiration -

Cape Town is located around a huge national park where natural beauty and awe-inspiring landscapes are hard to ignore. Having been born and raised in the metropolis of London, Cape Town was literally a breath of fresh air. The ability to be on the side of a mountain, 5 minutes from my home, engulfed in the flora and fauna that comes from it being one of the six Floral Kingdoms on Earth is both fortunate and life changing. The ability to take oneself away from human settlements and spend time in nature is vital. Nature is as honest as it gets and holds all of the answers we look to acquire. I found myself gravitating towards artists who hold this knowledge. The harshness of life and the ever-changing state of the world is hard to ignore. These nature based painters seemed less troubled and at ease with all that was being throwing at them. When I was a young boy, my grandfather, Harold, taught me the basics of how to hold a paintbrush and apply oil paints to a canvas. He was a fabulous landscape painter and a gentle grandfather. To spend time in nature; to walk, stand, sit, or lie, or to paint what is around you is perhaps the deepest meditation available. The morning and the evening bring with them delicious shadows and it was these shadows that inspired me in the first place to start a collection of inspiring imagery on my phone. Having never been taught how to paint properly (apart from lessons at school) it was a light-bulb moment when I realised that shadows can - and more often than not do - play a central role in an image. The colours that can be seen within these shadows tell stories of what has come before or what is soon to take place. Sometimes the subtleties between light and shadow call for them to be painted, whether that be in an urban or rural setting. I look forward to continually attempting to capture this magic for years to come.

I hope you enjoy my paintings and feel free to contact me with any questions whatsoever.

With love

Luke