Ray Rankine was born in Belfast and studied Drawing and Painting at the Ulster College of Art and Design (now part of The University of Ulster). He lives and works in London.
Recent paintings play with the ambiguity of meaning and language using various text sources as starting points: advertising copy, poetry, signage or junk-mail. The text becomes a visual element and influences the composition, though it is often distorted and abused in the painting process.
Older work refers more directly to everyday visual material - objects, photographs, text, fragments, or accidental finds which may suggest a path to a visual image through shape, colour, texture or content.