In 1927 he won the coveted Dunville Scholarship which enabled him to attend the Slade School of Art in London, where he studied painting and sculpture under the celebrated Henry Tonks, who greatly influenced his development as a draughtsman.
Luke painted in the style known as Regionalism (art), whose main proponents were Thomas Hart Benton (painter), Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Harry Epworth Allen.
From the late 1930s until 1943, when he produced Pax, there was a gap in his output, occasioned, no doubt, by his move to County Armagh in order to escape Belfast after the Blitz.
A retrospective exhibition of his work was held, in association with the Arts Councils of Ireland, in the Ulster Museum in 1978, and was accompanied by a short monograph on his life and career written by John Hewitt.
Since that time his reputation has grown enormously, his loss rekindling memories in many of his former students of a fastidiously arranged life-room in the College of Art, his coat folded to perfection and his soft, gentle manner of instruction.
His aesthetic otherwise embraced strictly traditional values, much of his inspiration, especially with regard to his interest in tempera painting, being drawn from the early masters of the Italian Renaissance such as Piero della Francesca and Botticelli.
One of the first paintings in which this change is noticeable is Connswater Bridge, 1934, in which large masses have been juxtaposed boldly one with another in a highly stylized manner, yet the clarity of the actual scene is retained.
But two years later, in 1936, when he painted The Bridge (which seems to have been inspired by André Derain's masterpiece The Turning Road, L’Estaque), his technique had matured to a degree which, perhaps, he never surpassed.
Here his formalism, expressed in flowing and rhythmic lines and shapes, is carefully matched to the undulating landscape and the colours are bright, the mood optimistic.
But this buoyancy was short-lived and by the following year, in The Fox, currently being exhibited in the Ulster Museum, his mood had changed and a seriousness of purpose began to emerge which eventually overwhelmed him.
His severely Spartan lifestyle seems to have sapped his energy completely by the mid 1950s and possibly, too, he suffered a crisis of confidence as the post-war world took shape and the inexorable advance of Modern painting overwhelmed the traditional values which he espoused.