Artists of past and present ARTISTS OF PAST AND PRESENT | Page 134

Ellison Robertson Ellison Robertson was born In Sydney, Nova Scotia in 1947, and spent most of his childhood in various coal-mining towns in the industrial heartland of the Cape Breton Island. In a brief autobiography he published Ellison has observed that "Like water to the fish and air to the birds, the experience of growing up in these working-class communities was the medium that transparently shaped my consciousness. It is clear enough in memory that my senses never completely denied the legacy of exploitation, struggle and poverty that had constructed these experiences". Ellison showed artistic promise early, and in 1966 was recommended by his teachers for a scholarship to study in Halifax at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), where four years later, upon graduation, he won the college’s Lieutenant Governor's Award. What emerged in the late 1970's and throughout the 1980's and 90's were powerful, honest paintings that documented and celebrated the people of Cape Breton: works that were never nostalgic, but often politically charged and always reflective of the hardships and sufferings of a culturally rich society that had long been and continued to be economically deprived and neglected.