Luke Sciberras’s ideal day is sitting down with friends and tucking into fresh produce that he has grown and cooked himself. “If I was to be contrived I’d say I was happy when in the throes of finishing a huge painting, and that’s a big contender,” Sciberras says. “But I’m happiest when I’m at my dining table filled with friends. I care very much about my friends.” Sciberras’s joie de vivre is evident in his paintings: generously applied oil-on-canvas landscapes, and still life inspired by the fruit he grows in his orchid. Although life in the studio is a solo pursuit, Sciberras has a constant stream of visitors to the sandstone church he calls his studio at Hill End, the craggily beautiful old mining town in central-west New South Wales that has provided inspiration to artists including Russell Drysdale and Margaret Olley. Sciberras moved there a decade ago, where the land fed his imagination with its starkly contrasting seasons of scaring hot summers and limb – numbing winters. These days the 36-year-old seeks inspiration through long road trips and the desert. “I’ve broadened my horizons in the past five years. The Flinders Ranges, Wilcannia and Broken Hill all hold appeal to me,” says Sciberras, who travels and paints with his friend, the revered artist John Olsen, who has labelled Sciberras the next great Australian landscape painter, has been busy this year working on a series of interiors and landscapes of the Nandewar Rangers, in north-west New South Wales, which will be exhibited at the Tim Olsen Gallery in Sydney in August. He’s also illustrating Lucio and the Art of Pasta, a book by his good friend and resteraunteur Lucio Galletto who, like Sciberras, lives for good food and art.