Luke Edward Hall

The romantic aesthetic of Luke Edward Hall’s works is informed by the past and suffused with various references, from the Bloomsbury Group, who very much believed in blurring the boundary between art and design, to Cecil Beaton with Wes Anderson sense of colour. He regularly draws his friends, acquaintances and imagined characters in a distinctive, fluid style referencing the eccentric lifestyles of the 1920s and ‘30s. Luke Edward Hall is greatly inspired by Jean Cocteau, whose mid-20th-century line drawings conjure the intimacy of romance, while the occupants of some of his more isolated scenes are imbued with the same emotional ambiguities that appear in the work of Patrick Procktor or John Craxton. His emotionally charged and aesthetically decorative work explores love, and masculine tropes. His poetic drawings and paintings vibrate with a bold, lyrical motion, combining classical iconography with the immediacy of the everyday oscillating between mythic narratives and a deeply personal interior space. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Hall’s intimate canvases combine pastel hues with explosive color to render a unique symbolical universe derived from folklore and art history. The results are dreamlike, exploring psychological terrain as well as broader concerns like the vulnerability and pervasive eroticism of the male body.