Luster Willis was born in 1913 in Terry, Mississippi. He is known for his paintings and illustrations, in which he uses a wide range of styles, approaches, and materials. He attended school through the eighth grade, when he became a full-time agricultural laborer on his family’s farm. He married Louvennia Bozman in 1934 and was stationed in Europe during WWII for three years. Upon his return to Mississippi, he went to trade school and received his barber’s certification.

Willis had an interest in and talent for art from a young age, but it wasn’t until he inherited his father’s farm in 1963 that he began to paint and draw more seriously. William Arnett of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation has said of Willis’s work in his essay, “Templates”:

“Many of Willis's first ideas for art came from visual media sources—commercial art that he found in print, newspaper comic strips, television, and billboards, and mass-produced reproductions of paintings. The act of mimicking the original allowed him to express differences from the views provided by the mass media. His earliest extant painting is such an act of transformation, in which the orange flowers cancel out the past life of the manufactured image, and at the same time assert the importance of the artist's touch.

Willis's penchant for copying and tracing, seen in much of his early work, becomes a modus operandi later. In the early eighties, he started receiving numerous requests for certain of his subjects that had been reproduced in books and exhibition catalogs and seen by collectors. Bored with replicating his own drawings and paintings but needing to fill the orders for economic reasons, Willis developed the idea of Plexiglas templates from which he could trace his stock images.”

“The two most frequently requested subjects were portraits—of the artist himself or of black luminaries—and This Is It. The Big One featuring a fish, which itself was probably originally traced from a photograph of a salmon. His Two Sides of Myself, a double-sided painting on Plexiglas in which he pictures himself in both serious and clownlike aspects, became the template for many later portraits, including Rev. Jesse Jackson.”

Throughout his life he created approximately 300 paintings and drawings. He was also known for this carved canes, of which he likely made even more. His primary materials are watercolors and acrylic paints on paper, cardboard, and plywood. As seen in Rich Man Poor Man, he sometimes uses glitter to achieve more depth. After suffering a stroke in 1986, Willis was partially paralyzed and bound to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. The subject of death was one that he frequently addressed throughout his work. As the artist has said, "We all think about death. We all going to die. I like to show it coming."

His first work addressing the subject was a meditation on the murder of Emmett Till. As a Black man living in the Jim Crow South, racial discrimination, violence, and inequity deeply affected him and his community, and these were issues that he addressed regularly in his work.