Artist Statement

 

Hannah Luxton's studio process is based on a mastery of traditional painting methods and materials.

Often grinding her own semi-precious and rare colours, such as malachite and lapis lazuli, Luxton predominantly employs single pigment oils to demonstrate a colours' character and clarity. She uses a variety of washes, glazes and minimal forms to create paintings that express balance, harmony and vibrancy.  Luxton's paintings are are sensual things, images that we perceive through our senses.

 

Hannah Luxton's paintings are inspired by philosophies such as Romanticism and animism, which intimates a living soul in natural phenomena. As such, she explores ways to depict a spiritual power at the heart of the material universe; nature imbued with a divine power. With pared down mark making to communicate the essence of the building blocks of the natural world, Luxton hints at a spiritual dimension beyond appearance. She finds her subjects in her observations of the sublime in landscape – from oceans and waterfalls, to mountains and craters, to the moon and stars – condensing and abstracting each referent into an archetypal version of itself. 

 

With large areas of linen bare and unpainted, Luxton proposes a metaphor for the infinity of the universe, giving form to supreme 'nothingness', dissolving the boundary frequently drawn between 'the natural world' that surrounds us on Earth and the 'natural' sphere of the cosmos.

 

Embracing this pictorial space, the artist finds a sense of freedom beyond the confines of materiality. She invites viewers into this space, at once a void and a place of almost infinite potentiality.