Archives: Essays

Essay by Luke Foster “Home was never a dream for homeless people as they used to have their homes. Living in a home was their reality. Now we need to help them to find the lost reality – again.” – Munia Khan I caught a train from Casino to Sydney overnight with my friend Birdie […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I’ve always had a determination to perfect whatever I’m doing. If I can’t do something, I work on it until I figure it out.” Stephanie Gilmore I was beach walking this morning and saw a woman pro surfer on the beach, but I am not sure who it was and only […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Become totally emptyQuiet the restlessness of the mindOnly then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness.”-Lao Tzu I have been racking my brain while beach walking in the morning the last few days trying to think of something to write about rather than letting it come to me naturally. However, I […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I guess I’m quite used to not being understood rather than being understood.” Bjork I have been getting back into video art in the last few years and I mainly perform for the camera and get my videographer/ photographer friend Julie Lowe to document it for me. Last night I watched […]

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 I have travelled quite a bit internationally and the common thread […]

Essay by Luke Foster “We should consider asking our fellow Australians something as simple as ‘Do you support an alteration to the constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?’” Albanese said in a landmark speech at the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land on Saturday. I feel its one thing to change the constitution […]

Essay by Luke Foster “When I was younger, I could eat whatever I wanted, as long as I exercised; or if I didn’t exercise and just watched what I ate, I’d maintain. Well, now I have to do both … I try to tell young people to get in shape now, because it’s easier. If you’re […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Gathering your own reference materials, sketches and using your own imagination is going to help you grow as an artist far more than stealing someone else’s work.” ― Bonnie Hamlin My artist friend Sean Cordeiro said that you’re not a real artist until you have an artwork stolen. Sean had a large Astro […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” Unknown indigenous author Perhaps it’s a little strange for a white Australian to talk about Aboriginal issues but I have some ideas on the subject. While studying Aboriginal culture at school we only studied about the ancient hunting and gathering lifestyle of […]

Essay by Luke Foster “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”Pablo Picasso The first coffee table artist book I bought was about the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and like the […]

Essay by Luke Foster “I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” J. D. Salinger I think I am up to the fifth or sixth time of proofreading my book Mother’s Love. The more I look the more I see that needs changing and now I […]

Essay by Luke Foster “One day we will remember how lucky we were to have known their love, with wonder, not grief.” Elizabeth Postle Since mums passing, I have thrown myself into my art and writing to cope with the great loss as I feel I have never known such powerful and pure love since […]

Essay by Luke Foster “He who strays from tradition becomes asacrifice to the extraordinary; he who remains in tradition is itsslave. Destruction follows in any case.” Friedrich Nietzsche Not much of my early artwork from art school or soon after has survived however as seen on my website I had proficient photographer friends to document […]

One of my favourite artworks by Katthy was a story of a girl performance installation at Art Space in Sydney. “Story of a girl is a work that attempts to make present what has been experienced abstractly, exploring issues of self-documentation and personal history. I have assembled on the gallery floor an extensive collection of personal […]

Essay by Luke Foster “It’s bad to use words like ‘genius’ unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict, and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those […]

“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 I watched Matthew Collings series This is Modern Art series about six months ago and what sits with me still is that he talked about the outmoded notion of the struggling […]

“Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.” Barack Obama I am soon going to shoot a video and photo shoot where I sit […]

Essay by Luke Foster “The mystical poetry of William Blake’s artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.” Bruce Dickinson Since I was a teenager, I have had a fascination with vinyl and their album covers. Then it was albums by the Doors, REM and the Cure that attracted me. Then about five years […]

“I’ve learned life is a lot like surfing. When you get caught in the impact zone, you need to get right back up, because you never know what’s over the next wave……and if you have faith, anything is possible, anything at all.” Soul Surfer I grew up surfing on Sydney’s Northern Beaches which has some of […]

Essay by Luke Foster “If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus, we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable […]

Essay by Luke Foster “People go back to the stuff that doesn’t cost a lot of money and the stuff that you don’t have to hand money to over and over again. Stuff that you get for free, stuff that your older brother gives you, stuff that you can get out of the local library”. […]

Essay by Luke Foster “It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.” Haruki Murakami / Kafka on the Shore Over the past four months I have been watching Netflix movies almost every night and sometimes even two movies. However, I have also been doing late internet shopping for books. […]

Essay by Luke Foster “The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand […]

Essay by Luke Foster “People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behaviour, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.” Johnny Depp Ever since Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands came out in 1990 Johnny Depp has been my favourite actor. Other […]

Essay by Luke Foster “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the […]