“I try to trick myself into thinking it’s the 18th century,” says the artist known simply as Lukas the Illustrator, speaking from his studio on Westport Island, Maine. To a soundtrack of orchestral chants or sea shanties, fanciful motifs flow from his old-school dip pen, conjuring scenes that hover between architectural ruins, theater sets, and sylvan dreamscapes. “Lately, I’ve been fixated on men riding scallop shells and fighting dragons,” he reports.
Lukas grew up in Connecticut, traipsing through the forest behind his childhood home. He pursued art for a simple reason: It would allow him to spend time outside drawing from nature. He hadn’t yet graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied illustration, when his friend the fashion designer Harris Reed got him a job creating packaging for MAC Cosmetics. Commissions have since followed from House of Hackney and AD100 maestro Beata Heuman.
“I’ve always felt these two sides of myself, the prince and the green man,” Lukas says, explaining the creative push and pull between life’s finer things and the great outdoors. True to that tension, sumptuous canopy beds in woodland environs form a recurring subject. “I love the idea of a luxurious castle bedroom but with no walls—nothing but the trees, leaves blowing, a frog jumping over your bed, a stream bubbling by.”
These days, he’s channeling those reveries into a children’s book, a miniature theater for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in London, and patterns for fabrics and wallpapers, among them a lattice of iris leaves. Not surprisingly, his dreams continue to grow bigger. “I’d like to create one of my arctic grotto tents as a mural,” he says, referring to his ongoing series of campaign-style drapery set in frozen landscapes. “You’ll see icebergs out the windows.” Consider it a trompe l’oeil 18th-century folly, tailored to our modern times. lukastheillustrator.com —Hannah Martin
