John Luke RUA

John Luke was born in Belfast and became mainly a painter of landscape and figures. He was an artist who very much dedicated his time to craftsmanship and before winning a scholarship to the Belfast School of Art, he worked in the shipyard of Belfast and the York street flax spinning mill. Luke then moved to London and it was here that he began to show his work through exhibitions.

During the Second World War, John took a break from painting and took up teaching at the Belfast College of Art. At the time of the 1940’s, Luke’s work was barely known outside of Ulster, but when James White from Dublin saw his pieces, he said, ‘John Luke has achieved colour tones of purity, and textural values of a quality unequalled by any painter of the past three centuries whose work I know.’