David Rankin OAM (b. 1946) came to Australia with his English parents at the age of two in 1948. Living in Port Hacking, Hay, Wagga Wagga, Albury, Bourke and Brewarrina, Rankin taught himself to paint through reading about great artists and Buddhism. By the time he arrived in Sydney in 1967 he aimed to express the essence of being through a fusion of Western, Indigenous Australian and Asian art traditions. Rankin first exhibited at Watters Gallery at the age of 22. In 1979, a widower with a young child, he met Lily Brett, whose personal history further inspired his work; he illustrated two of her books about the Holocaust and made series of works on Jewish and matrimonial themes. In 1983 he won the Wynne Prize for landscape. His diptych The Scorched Earth 1984–1985 was commissioned by the Victorian Arts Centre. Having exhibited at Watters, Macquarie, Ray Hughes, Adrian Slinger and Chapman galleries, Rankin moved with Brett to New York in 1989. American art critic Dore Ashton, author of The Walls of the Heart: The Work and Life of David Rankin, curated a retrospective of the artist’s work that was exhibited in Australian regional galleries from 2005–2006. Ashton published a second book David Rankin: The New York Years in 2013. Rankin has had many solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Paris, London, Beijing and New York, and his work is held in major Australian collections.
