Luke Sciberras

Luke Sciberras (born 1975) is an Australian landscape painter.

Born in Campbelltown, New South Wales, Sciberras attended the National Art School in Sydney in the mid-to-late-1990s and was mentored by Australian artists including Elisabeth Cummings. In 2002, he moved to Hill End, New South Wales, where he became a central figure in the local contemporary arts scene. Sciberras has travelled extensively for his work, and since an episode of illness in 2012, has become more contemplative in his approach to his art.

As of 2024, Sciberras was described in The Australian as one of the "biggest names in Australian contemporary art".

Biography Sciberras was born in Campbelltown, New South Wales, in 1975 to a Maltese father and a mother born to Ukrainian immigrants. After his parents separated when he was three, Sciberras was raised as an only child by his mother. He attended Mount Carmel Catholic High School, where he held no particular interest in art nor aspirations towards a career in painting. Over the following decade, he attended the National Art School in Sydney in the late-1990s and became integrated into the Australian art scene. During this period he was mentored by Australian artists including Ann Thomson, Garry Shead, Guy Warren, Robert Klippel, and Tim Storrier, Together, they had a daughter, and shared a studio in a deconsecrated Methodist church, with Shead using the space in the afternoon and Sciberras using it in the morning.

Around 2010, Shead and Sciberras divorced. As of 2011, Sciberras was dating artist Justine Muller. Each month, he made a trip to the artistic community at Robertson, New South Wales, where he would paint. The community, informally headed by artist John Olsen and including Ben Quilty, knew Sciberras under the nickname "the Scribbler".

Myocarditis In 2012, Sciberras experienced significant stress when he fell out with a friend and experienced the death of another, and he became ill with double pneumonia. In the Australian autumn (March–May), he was hospitalized after experiencing intense chest pain. He was told he had experienced heartburn and returned home, but was quickly recalled to hospital and diagnosed with myocarditis, a condition involving swelling of the heart. When he was discharged days later, Shead returned him home and assisted with household tasks.

After remaining immobile for three months waiting for his heart's swelling to subside, Sciberras returned to painting. He later described experiencing a loss of confidence and a greater sense of his vulnerability. Four years later, he admitted himself to hospital after experiencing chest pains, dismissed by a doctor as "anxiety and exhaustion".

Painting style After his diagnosis of myocarditis, Sciberras noticed a shift in his art from arriving at landscapes and trying quickly to capture them, to waiting until he felt he understood the place deeper before painting. Art writer Anna Johnson described Sciberras's work following the episode as more "immersive" and reverent, as well as "darker, stronger and just that bit more profound".

In a 2017 profile in The Australian, Sciberras's artistic practice was described as relatively prolific, using a colour palette resembling that of J. M. W. Turner. His works were described as balancing a rejection of stasis and classical technique with an apparent debt to the works of earlier Australian landscape painters.