Luke Gray

Luke Gray is a British painter and muralist from Leicester. Born colour blind, he works in an almost entirely black and white palette broken by occasional flashes of red, letting dense pattern and texture do the work colour usually does. After studying graphic design in London he hitchhiked from Moscow to Thailand painting murals along the way, travelled through more than fifty countries, and eventually set up a studio in southern China. An amateur ethnologist, he stays with indigenous communities and records their textile patterns, handicrafts, tattoo markings and sacred symbols, then reassembles them into surrealist ink and graphite compositions. His clients include Google, Oxford University and the Saatchi Gallery, and in London he painted the "Indigenous" mural across the front of the Ethical Bean Company in Hackney Wick.