Luke Lindoe

Luke Orton Lindoe (8 March 1913 – 4 December 2000) was a Canadian potter, painter, sculptor, and businessman who did most of his work in Alberta, Canada.

For long periods he was based in Medicine Hat.

He had many different jobs, from mineral prospecting, coal mining, and teaching art, to producing potting clay and manufacturing ceramic products such as ashtrays.

He also had many commissions for stone or concrete murals on public buildings.

During his lifetime he gained a high reputation as a mentor of ceramic artists and for his own ceramics, oil paintings, and sculptures.

Luke Orton Lindoe was born on 8 March 1913 in Bashaw, Alberta.

For the first sixteen years of his life Lindoe and his mother wandered in western Canada and the United States.

He attended twenty-eight schools, but never completed grade ten.

In 1933 Lindoe tried to start a farm to the south of Fort St. James in British Columbia.

He put up buildings and bought a few animals.

After a hopeless struggle that winter, he was forced to abandon the project and sell out.

Lindoe decided that he wanted to study art.

He went for help to his father, who was general manager of two mines in Coleman, Alberta.

He worked as an underground coal miner while studying painting and then sculpture at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art, now the Alberta College of Art and Design (1935–1940) in Calgary.

After four years he had not completed enough hours to qualify for a diploma.

In 1939 he became an Associate Member of the Alberta Society of Artists.

He went to Toronto to study sculpture at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) while his funds lasted (1940–1941), and there became interested in ceramics.

Lindoe married Vivian Lamont in 1940, a fellow student at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art.

Lindoe moved to Medicine Hat, Alberta in 1941, where he worked for Medicine Hat Potteries.

He then became a production foreman at Redcliff Potteries.

In 1942 he gained a job as an assistant draftsman in Calgary with a subsidiary of Consolidated Mining and Smelting.

In 1942 Lindoe found a job as a geological surveyor for Imperial Oil, and spent three years mapping the Whitemud Formation in Cypress Hills.

At the end of this period he was an expert in the local clays.

During the winters he was absorbed in painting.

Lindoe developed a life-long interest in researching the properties of clay.

Virginia Christopher of Virginia Christopher Fine Art gallery in Calgary, knew Lindoe for many years.

She said of his ability to find the best deposits of clay, "He had an intuition about water courses ... He understood the drift of things in the Cypress Hills, he knew where the deposits would end up."

Their son Allan was born in 1944, and Carroll was born in 1946.

In 1945, Lindoe threw up his job and moved to Salmon Arm, British Columbia to paint full time.

He became a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (C.S.P.W.C.) in 1946.

He returned to Calgary and was an instructor at the Alberta College of Art from 1947 to 1957, where he developed the ceramics department.

One of his students was Henry Bonli, who became a painter and interior designer.

Lindoe also pushed Walter Dexter into becoming a ceramic artist, and was Dexter's mentor for many years.

By 1951 he had been elected Second Vice-President of the C.S.P.W.C. and also Chairman of the Alberta Society of Artists (1949-1950).

In 1952 Lindoe resigned from all exhibiting societies.

The studio opened in 1954, with a 40 cuft updraft kiln that Lindoe had built by hand.

It mainly produced cast pottery items, such as square ashtrays.

He said, "I had hit the wall and had neither the wisdom nor the courage to carry on in an environment that I knew was alien to me, but it wasn’t until 1964 or ’65 that I started to get the courage to expose myself artistically again."

He and J. Sproule formed a partnership that year to develop a small pottery studio, first called Lindoe Studios and later Ceramic Arts.

Lindoe had the expertise and Sproule provided the money.