Artist Statement

I grew up in Utah’s alpine lakes, snow-covered peaks, and red desert hoodoos, exploring these wild places with a sketchbook in hand and a desire to experience the landscape. This intimacy with the land instilled in me a reverence for its complex beauty and a profound awareness of its constant state of becoming. Life in these ecosystems, whether through the slow digestion of stone by lichens or rivers carving deep stories into rock, is defined by its intricate interactions and adaptations to change. Witnessing humans develop, encroach, and attempts to assert control over these places, I became acutely aware of the tension between ecosystem and exploitation, growth and loss.

The landscapes I paint are shaped by memory, not direct observation — a synthesis of specific places and experiences filtered through time. Vivid colors and simplified forms evoke the idealization memory induces, where the intricate textures of reality give way to dreamlike clarity. My work reimagines the landscapes I cherish through symbolic representations of plant life, questioning how we view, experience, and manipulate the land. The hyper-saturated hues and flat, planar surfaces of my paintings reference the digital filters through which many of us now consume nature, reducing the wilderness to something seen rather than lived. These stylized landscapes, though vibrant and seductive, are also inhospitable in their uncanny rigidity, critiquing our tendency to alienate ourselves from the natural world while attempting to control it. 

As a painter, I engage with the rich history of landscape art, from the Romantics’ awe-inspiring sublime to the colonists’ idealized visions of fertile land to be claimed, and from the Realists’ depictions of labor to the Impressionists’ visions of luminous escapes. Different eras of landscape reflects humanity’s evolving relationship with nature, as we reshape the land to fit economic, cultural, or industrial narratives. Today, I grapple with landscapes irrevocably shaped by human hands, where “nature” is no longer natural. My process mirrors this paradox: crafting paper models of landscapes and translating them into paintings that flatten complexity into planar simplicity. This transformation reflects how humans reconstitute nature for consumption—stripping it of depth, chaos, and interconnectedness to fit our desires.

My work celebrates the awe-inspiring resilience of the natural world while critiquing the absurdity of humanity’s efforts to dominate and idealize it. These paintings are both homage and interrogation, exploring our contradictory relationship with the wild. They are meditations on place—where ecology and culture collide—and on my shifting place within it. Through reimagined landscapes, I aim to reflect on the beauty, fragility, and complexity of a world that is simultaneously being sculpted by geological forces and reshaped by human hands.

Bio

Luke Watson grew up in exploring the diverse ecologies of the western United States from his hometown of Salt Lake City. An early interest in drawing and painting led him east to receive a B.F.A. in painting from Pratt Institute. The draw of the deserts and mountains brought him west again shortly after his degree. While continuing to maintain a studio practice, he worked various jobs in production and carpentry in Oregon, Utah, and then Arizona where he decided to reattend school to pursue art more intensely as well as cultivate an interest in art education. He now holds an M.F.A. from Arizona State University and lives in Phoenix teaching art at the community college while he continues deepening his relationship with the land through art, painting, and exploration.