Archives: Essays

Essay by Luke Foster “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”― Sylvia Plath I am just at the Sydney airport on the way home from the 5th studio residency I have done at the BigCi in Bilpin the Blue Mountains. […]

Essay by Luke Foster “The destiny of every walking man is to immerse himself in the panorama surrounding him, to the point of becoming one with it and, ultimately, to vanish”.”  ― Federico Castigliano, Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then ‘process’.” Edward De Bono Some people think that art […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Tradition is the great misleader because it’s too easy to follow what has already been done – even though you may think you’re giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.” Marcel Duchamp My favourite artist Joseph Beuys made an artwork about one of […]

Essay by Luke Foster “In terms of people who we call heroes – and I don’t tend to like that term, and firefighters don’t consider themselves heroes – but if you look at their job description, they are. Their job is to straight up save people.” Jesse Spencer I don’t know a lot about Australian […]

Essay by Luke Foster “In the studio, I don’t do a lot of work that requires repetitive activity. I spend a lot of time looking and thinking and then try to find the most efficient way to get what I want, whether it’s making a drawing or a sculpture, or casting plaster or whatever.”  Bruce […]

Essay by Luke Foster “We cannot stop natural disasters but we can arm ourselves with knowledge: so many lives wouldn’t have to be lost if there was enough disaster preparedness.” Petra Nemcova In my limited knowledge of international natural disaster relief, I think the mobilisation of the rescue mission is crucial in the first 48 […]

Essay by Luke Foster “The 2022 eastern Australia floods were one of the nation’s worst recorded flood disasters with a series of floods that occurred from late February to early May in South East Queensland, the Wide Bay–Burnett and parts of coastal New South Wales.” Google Search During the floods in 2022 I was living in a studio apartment […]

Essay by Luke Foster “The secret of happiness you see is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” Socrates For my whole adult life, I have quite often lived in small living spaces both in Australia and abroad. Now that I finally got my own place, I am happy […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”  May Sarton At high school at Saint Augustine’s College in Sydney I was top of the art class most of the time but my high school major works were made with a colourful array of crayons and were about […]

Essay by Luke Foster “ Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren’t meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.” Cindy Sherman   I entered the ocean shores art expo last year […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” Henry Rollins Henry Rollins: I Know You: spoken word piece I had a gay friend at school and I won’t use his real name but I shall just call him John. We were […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was.” Tim Burton I am an absolute popular culture freak including popular music such as rock and roll and pop and Hollywood movies […]

Essay by Luke Foster “You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”  Buddha When I was in my late teens and early twenties at art school, I thought bohemian writers like Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were cool and because I had […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I’m not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I’m certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.”  Rowan Atkinson Over the last few years, […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I wish my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life.”  Julie Doucet Normally I write essays that are accessible for people of all ages but this essay refers to comic zine and […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”  ― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space When I was at art school in the nineties my sculpture lecturers told us all to read the French philosophers: Gaston Bachelard’s: The Poetics of Space […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Joan Grounds’ work….engages with nature, with the placement of women, with the body of women, with memory and with ways of exploring all of these.” (Julie Ewington, 2001) In the decades since finishing art school where I got my Bachelor of Fine Arts and then my Masters in Sculpture, I have […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I’m afraid of.” Marina Abramovic Marina Abramovic born November 30 1946 is a Serbian performance artist. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience and performer, the limits of the body, and […]

Essay by Luke Foster  “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh lord please don’t let me be misunderstood.” — Regina Spektor I am not very good about organising social events but I would love to organise a dinner party for artists of all kinds including music, writing, theatre, film and art from countries around […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.” ― Edward de Bono My first solo exhibition in […]

UNHCR most recently estimated that, by end of 2022, for the first time in recorded history, the number of people forcibly displaced is now 108.4 million, and over 35.3 million refugees. Essay by Luke Foster “A refugee is someone who survived and who can create the future.” – Amela Koluder I watched an interesting movie tonight on Netflix called […]

Essay by Luke Foster “We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”  Mother Teresa In late 2000 aged 29 I took my first adult trip […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Discovering more joy does not, save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Only through compassion and inner peace, can one spread peace in the world. Inner peace leads to a peaceful individual and then this peaceful individual can build a peaceful family, then a peaceful community, then a peaceful world.” His Holiness the Dalai Lama I think if one was to ask every […]