Luke Anderson

Luke Anderson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. The self-taught oil painter is inspired by the landscapes of the American West, a subject for which the passion was seeded by road trips taken as a child throughout the West from his home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Anderson received a double-major from the University of Wyoming in American studies and environment and natural resources with a focus on historic preservation. The artist’s background in environmental studies and the humanities has played an important role in informing ideas about landscape that have influenced his work. 

Anderson’s work is rooted in places and experiences he has lived and seen, reimagining the experience from memory and reference photos, and using layers and reductive techniques for depth and texture. The paintings of Luke Anderson incorporate contemporary elements of surrealism, abstraction, and graphic design into the often more traditional genre of Western Art. His influences are of a broad range, from comic strips to an obsession with the Impressionists and their palette and paint handling, to modernists and abstract expressionists, to graphic design and computer animation.

In Anderson’s view, he sees both the “aesthetic West” of impressive landscapes and wild life, while also noting it is “a land of unique complexity… there’s a pull between future and past,” he reflected in a 2022 “Artists to Watch” interview in Southwest Art Magazine. “And I think that’s a lot of what we are trying to do as Western artists, is trying to figure out what that spectrum is, where we land on it, and how we feel about that.”

Luke Anderson’s work has been exhibited at prominent regional institutions, including the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming and the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah. Selected exhibitions include Wyoming Capitol Governors’ Arts Exhibition (2017), the Coors Western Art Show in Denver, Colorado (2020-2022), Springville Art Museum Annual Salon (2020-2022), Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum Western Spirit Show (2017-2020), and the Springville Art Museum Annual Salon (2020-2022). Distinguished awards include “Best Oil Painting” at the 2020 Western Spirit Art Show & Sale at Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Honorable Mention at the 2020 Annual Salon at Springville Art Museum in Springville, Utah; and, most recently, the Fine Art Connoisseur Award at the 2022 Coors Western Art Show. His paintings have been featured in the pages of Western Art Collector and Big Sky Journal magazines. He was named an “Artist to Watch” for 2022 by Southwest Art Magazine.