Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and raised in Augusta, Georgia, where he had his first experience of making art under the tutelage of painter Edward Rice, Luke Allsbrook earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from Indiana University Bloomington and a master of fine arts degree (cum laude) from the New York Academy of Art. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and is included in many private, corporate, and institutional collections, including the Forbes Collection, Mercedes-Benz USA, the United States Department of State, the Morris Museum of Art, Duke Divinity School, the Southern Company, Michigan State University, 3M, the University of North Carolina Asheville, and the Royal Collection of Charles, Prince of Wales. (Allsbrook served as official tour artist during Prince Charles’s state tour of the United States in 2005.) A recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, he has taught drawing and painting at the New York Academy of Art, the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, William Paterson University, the University of North Carolina Asheville, and with the University of Georgia Studies Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy. He resides with his wife and four children in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

As he has written, “I try to let nature be my guide. The best ideas come like a gift. A painting might begin with a question as simple as, ‘If I could create any painting in the world, what would it be?’ I categorize my work into two parts—the smaller, plein air paintings where I go into nature and do quick journal like sketches and the larger, bolder canvases drawn from memory that capture the settings realistically.” The present exhibition, drawn from private, corporate, and museum collections, examines Allsbrook’s treatment of the landscape principally through the changing seasons of the year. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with an essay by former Morris Museum curator Jay Williams and a foreword by Edward Rice.