Luke Allsbrook: Enamored Vision

“Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light…Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till…They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.” -C.S. LewisWhen I paint, I am striving to see out into the world—to concentrate all my attention on what I am observing or painting about. I resist the urge to scrutinize my own style, demonstrate my technical facility, or monitor the success of the work at hand. I am a hunter of visual facts, not intent on cold accuracy, but searching ardently for “facts transfigured by love” that I may convey with paint. I want the viewer to be transported to the place I was painting and feel the joy I was feeling. Ankle deep in a river, painting the undulating lights on a sandy river bottom, I’m specially placed as an artist to validate the human experience of beauty. I defy the proposition that enchantment is merely a chemical reaction in the brain and that we inhabit a meaningless universe. I raise a flag proclaiming there is a fundamental spiritual reality that transcends the facts of the material world.

I believe, As Flannery O’Conner once wrote, that great art should be based on “all those observed facts that make actual the mystery of our position on Earth”.