Born in Glynneath in 1944, Ken Elias studied at Cardiff College of Art from 1965 to 1966 and at Newport College of Art and Design from 1966 to 1969, where he gained a BA Hons in Fine Art. Returning to Cardiff in the Eighties he gained his MA in Fine Art.
Influenced by his childhood association with a local cinema, and the use of memory and imagination, he has exhibited paintings,photomontage works, prints, and mixed media works across the UK, Europe, and the USA. His work is represented in private collections and the principal galleries and museums of Wales. In 2009 Elias held a major Retrospective Exhibition at The National Library of Wales, that celebrated forty four years work as an artist and toured to three other venues in Wales. This exhibition coincided with the publication of ‘ Ken Elias:Thin Partitions’ a monograph edited by Ceri Thomas and published by Seren, it has a foreword by Professor Dai Smith, and essays by Hugh Adams, David Briers, Jon Gower, Anne Price-Owen and Ceri Thomas.
For sometime now,my painting has been influenced by a childhood connection with a local cinema and my early acquaintance with regular ‘picture-going’. Going to the ‘pictures’ in the Fifties was an experience, that more than any other, promoted a sense of solitude in the company of other ‘picture-goers’. As Ian Breakwell has written ‘ There is something about the cinema that encourages,right there in the picture house, thoughts, feelings and behaviour in its patrons by turns enigmatic, terrifying, erotic, sad, hilarious and poetic, often triggered by uncanny interplay between screen image and real time events in the auditorium and the world beyond the muffled doors. ‘Alone in a crowd’ is never so intense as at the movies, and never so open to sudden dislocation. It is the complex play between me, you, them, the cinema building and the world outside that enables us on occasion, to experience reality more completely, and as in dreams, to see in the dark.’ My own very early and regular practice of ‘picture-going’, appears to have been a significant and formative experience. One that still holds influence and that until today continues to motivate and drive my painting.
It has invited new and disparate ways of seeing and offered an invaluable means of exploring the nature of memory.