Teacher's Professional Development Symposium -- May 2, 2024

Duane Lutsko (born January 24, 1955, Corpus Christi, Texas) paints the American landscape of the highway, industry, and the unassuming imagery we generally turn a blind eye to. His motif is the amalgamation of the hardware and paraphernalia, left in the wake of development, on the American landscape.

Mr. Lutsko was fortunate to have had a mentor early in his career, a high school art teacher named Robert Worthington. Worthington set the bar high and instilled in his student a respect for rigorous drawing.

During Duane's undergraduate experience at UCLA he was a maverick due to his respect for and study of art history. By the late 1970's entropy was the critical metaphor and painting was DOA. He was fortunate to work under the auspices of Lee Mulligan and Bill Brice at UCLA. Lee Mulligan focused his attention on rhythm and mark-making. Bill Brice primed his student to ground these ideas in the fundamentals of design. The idea of painting as structure began to coalesce. Upon graduation, he received a Bank of America Award in Art.

In the fall of 1977 Mr. Lutsko moved to New York City. His introduction to the art world came by way of the Figurative Alliance. There he met the painters Paul Georges and Phil Serrod, and came into first hand contact with the psyche and ego that shapes an artistic personae. New York was the sounding board for testing one's metal and Duane's encounters with artists like Robert DeNiro Sr. and Larry Rivers had a memorable influence on him.

By 1981 Mr. Lutsko ventured up onto the rooftops and subway platforms to paint the cityscape pleine-air. The New York city rooftop paintings began garnering awards. The first was in an exhibit in Marmaronock, New York in 1885; the Eileen U Award. The next came in a show in Shreveport, LA in 1985; Third Place at the SPAR National. Then, exhibiting in Corsicana, TX in 1986, he won First Place at the Warehouse Arts Center.

In 1982, on his first trip abroad he traveled for 5 months throughout Europe and fell in love with Italy. He made a pact with himself to return there on a Fulbright Fellowship, and enrolled in the graduate painting department at Brooklyn College, City University upon his return to New York.

The Master of Fine Arts program at Brooklyn College was a humbling experience with some of the finest representational artists on staff: Lee Bontecou, Allen D'Archangelo, Lennart Anderson, and Professor Emeritus, Phillip Pearlstein. His advisor was Sam Gelber. Under the auspices of Bontecou and D'Archangelo, Duane engaged in intaglio print-making and fortified his bond to tonal nuance and line media. A workshop on Chinese Brush Painting with Phillip Pearlstein was cathartic and Duane reinvested his energy into painting. He produced a cityscape thesis show in June of 1985, and received a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 1986-87.

The Fulbright represented an attained goal, and the 10 months in Italy were formidable in developing his artistic personae. Outside of a comfort zone, Italy presented an opportunity for renewal and reinvention. He returned with a subtle, more tonal palette, and a command of the Italian language.

Back in New York, Mr. Lutsko set a goal for a college level teaching appointment and relocated to Maryland in the summer of 1988 for an Artist-in-Residence position at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis. Within the year, he was teaching studio courses at Anne Arundel Community College. His painting shifted to the massive scale and landscape displacement of highway construction. Construction as landscape became his idiom and metaphor for the unassuming, environmentally congested by-products of development and progress.

In the fall of 1991 Mr. Lutsko received a 2-month residency grant to the Vermont Studio Center. Therein he was one of the featured artists of a Vermont Public Television production of life and events at the Center. It was an intensive period working under the counsel of various visiting artists, foremost of whom were: Philip Pearlstein, Wolf Kahn, David Shaprio, James Gahagan, Charles Garabedian, and Peter Plagens. The television production was aired in the winter of 1992 on Vermont Public Television.

The construction site theme continued to garner interest and Mr. Lutsko was presented the Award of Merit by juror William Christenberry, for the Art on Canvas exhibition at the Maryland Federation of Arts in Annapolis, in the spring of 1993. The work was also favorably reviewed in the "Baltimore Sun" by art critic John Dorsey, who noted,

"You will have trouble finding art that deals with currently popular sociopolitical issues here, unless it's Duane Lutsko's paintings of highway construction. But there certainly doesn't appear to be anything judgmental about his skillfully rendered paintings that are among the most satisfying in the show. It's not about the environment, it's about color and light and composition and space."

In 1993, Mr. Lutsko was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Prince Georges County Arts Council to paint the controversial highway construction of the bridge spanning the Severn River, in Annapolis. In the same year he was also awarded the Maryland Alliance for Arts Education Award for his work in education.

In the fall of 1994, he began teaching art in Baltimore County Public Schools. He is currently an instructor at Catonsville Alternative School in Baltimore teaching at-risk youth. Duane's philosophy of teaching to the visual/spatial/kinesthetic domains of the brain provides his students with alternative strategies for success and for critical thinking skills.

In the spring semester of 2001, the Maryland Institute College of Art invited Mr. Lutsko to join the continuing studies faculty. He continued instructing there thru the summer of 2010, where upon he decided to dedicate his time to his art and his alternate studio in Cumberland, MD.

His painting received recognition from the Maryland State Arts Council in a 2002-2003 Individual Artist Award Grant. In 2003, he was commissioned to paint the imagery for the 2003 Waterfront Festival poster. This poster was granted the Pinnacle Award Gold Metal.

In 2009 Duane received first place in the Maryland Federation of Art American Landscape exhibition. Mr. Lutsko looks forward to a one-man exhibition at the Saville Gallery in Cumberland, MD in April of 2012. His workspace, Pitterra Studios, is shared with his wife and fellow artist, Amy Lutsko.