Luke Morgan

Biography

While studying Fine art at Bristol Polytechnic I experimented with painting techniques and composition. My work at the time was concerned with creating narratives and tensions using compositional formulas. I was deeply influenced by Edvard Munch and Caravaggio.

In 1992 I graduated with honours and continued to paint figurative thought provoking and suggestive images. In 1994 I started my Masters degree in Art and Design Education at Warwick University. At the same time, I inherited some cine film from my grandparents. The footage was largely taken in the 1950's and features my father, uncles and aunties and grandparents on holiday. Those candid snapshot images together with the old Technicolor film process produced very nostalgic images.

I started to paint, aiming to recreate that sense of nostalgia. I found, by selecting quite ambiguous compositions and painting them using a limited colour pallette, a more poignant image emerged. This theme lead me onto painting images that evoked a sense of nostalgia from my own childhood. The sounds of seagulls, blue skies broken up by flashes of white, have all contributed enormously to my seagull series.

My work is now starting to evolve into a new theme. The process of transferring cine film to video and then taking pictures of the televison, scanning the photographs into my PC and finally printing out and then painting, has affected my work once more. I've been fascinated by the whole process of reproduction. Each system of reproduction infers its own unique characteristic, so my paintings are becoming more ambiguous, intriguing and profound.