Townsend Studio | Luke B Townsend
Manhattan, KS
I create through a curiosity of many interests, languages, and mediums, woven through the influence of Buddha Dharma.
Message
Based in the Flint Hills of Kansas, Luke B is a multi-disciplinary artist working in photography, alternative printmaking, and calligraphy.
Woven through the influence of Buddha Dharma, Luke's work is both an active response to his own mental health, and an instrument - tuning him into the Buddhist practices of training the mind.
He is currently a student of Tibetan Calligraphy under Master Calligrapher and Dharma Artist, Tashi Mannox, and completed a year of Tibetan language studies at the University of Kansas as a scholarship recipient from the Center for East Asian Studies.
Luke has multiple photographic works in the permanent collection of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, and in 2022 installed a permanent photographic mural, 13x32’, in the ceiling of the DOW Center for Multicultural and Community Studies in Hale Library at Kansas State University. Multiple other photographs are on display across the KSU campus in collections at the Morris Family Multicultural Student Center, Staley School of Leadership Studies, and within the Presidential Residence of KSU President Richard Linton and First Lady Sally Linton.
Luke is a freelance contributor for ZUMA Press with work published in Wisdom Publications, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, ABC News, The New Territory, Kansas Leadership Center Journal, and newspapers across the globe.
He serves on the board of the Friends of the Beach Museum of Art and is a member of the National Press Photographers Association.
Statement
My work in photography is shaped out of a simple interest to experience. Torn between the hooks of duality, I’ve found that it was by working within the constant pull do the thresholds slowly merge as our conscious, worldly experience is informed by Buddha Dharma, and expressed through art.
In processing my own evolution, working within pre-fabricated identities only further propelled the endless cycle of mental incarceration; restricted from a realized freedom. Navigating those past layers in my work, I’m gravitated into exploring a fundamental identity, playing on the interludes between the human condition and our relationship with the causes and conditions which shape our realities.
While many of my bodies of work begin as journalistic curiosities, I discovered a freedom in the process which lies in long form creation. Photographing at the behest of time, allowing ideas and projects the space to formulate and shape themselves, open to the ever changing ebbs and flows of our own mental dispositions. Conversely, the studio forces you into direct confrontation with the work. Analyzing many past moments of a fluid experience through the stability and tangibility of a photographic print, allows for an ambiguous synchronization of past and present, introducing the unlimited potential to visually rearrange reality. Thus is the challenge and freedom of working in long form merging body, speech, and mind with the entire process, effectively reshaping both our minds and realities.
Studying the Tibetan spoken language motivated me to explore language through pen & ink, where I became inspired by the works of many contemporary Tibetan calligraphers who, with masterful proficiency, maintain integrity in Buddha Dharma, creatively layering depth of message through their own artistic expression.
Utilizing various historical photographic printing processes, I’m driven to experiment in collaboration with multiple mediums unified into a single artwork; presenting traditional in the contemporary, motivated by the direct advice of Acharya Lama Gursam Rinpoche; to explore and photograph our conscious experience in order to benefit many beings.
As with all of my work, it is simply of my own experience as it evolves,
— a visual debate —
— an active exhibition —
shared with the aim of benefiting others through challenging learned observations and past conditioning, while expanding the creative potential to communicate.