DR MARK ELLIOT-RANKEN

Since I was nine, I’ve known that an artist’s way would be mine after feeling that spine tingling emotion of creating a ‘work of art’. I remember it today (at sixty-eight) that tingling is with me still whenever I create that something out of seemingly nothing.

The completion of my PhD at Newcastle University in 2010 merely emphasised this tingling. I wrote of nomad artists and what being on the move does to the artist as they ‘become other’ on the way.

Since then, I have continued to work exploring painting in as many manifestations as I can. The very language of creativity deeply fascinates me. It’s not about merely communication but exploration of our inner terrain of ‘knowing thyself’ as is chiselled into the lintel on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It is a never-ending quest.

However, the relationship between Artist and society has always been a difficult one, why? Perhaps because artists by what they do, a magic the earliest, deepest magic unlike any other shakes just quietly the foundations of a comfortable certainty that society coverts. This is I believe an inherent quality of artists committed to their art because art itself is not quantifiable, explores the not known and bites.

Art must bite if it to say something meaningful, indeed art and the artist ask, “what do you understand as ‘meaning’?” Do you simply except the multiple a priori that encrust like coral reefs societies’ assertions of what is normal and acceptable to that society. For an artist this is our stock in trade! We go where the rest will not and question that which must be questioned if cultures are to renew themselves along with the societies that so need these questions asked.

I would not be anything else, nothing sends that tingle up my spine like Art. Yet Artists do occupy a problematic, troublesome space, an ‘other’ of long standing within our society especially in capitalist, utilitarian-materialist societies such as Australia and I would suggest always will.