In his series of stories of remarkable Canberrans, DAVID TURNBULL meets Luke Cornish, a self-taught artist with an enviable global reputation.

When I ask world-renowned stencil artist, ELK, what he thinks of fame, he responds: “Not much”.

“It’s just a bunch of people you don’t know who think you are something that you are not. It’s nothing to aspire to.”

“I haven’t changed,” he says, holding his hands out in reference to the black hoodie he’s wearing, “I’m still the guy from Spence.”

He’s an unusual guy, ELK. Without any formal training in art, he’s been prolific and quite phenomenal in what he’s achieved.

Since 2007, Luke Cornish has had work hung in the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Australian War Memorial as well as dozens of galleries around Australia.

He’s also taken his work to the world via 67 joint exhibitions including England, France, The Netherlands, Germany and the US. He’s also had 21 solo shows. 

In 2012, Luke became the first stencil artist selected as a finalist in the Archibald Prize with his brutally honest depiction of outspoken South Melbourne Catholic priest Father Bob Maguire.

He repeated the effort three more times with portraits of business management expert Sue Cato, in 2017, and Sydney City Council’s first Aboriginal councillor, Yvonne Weldon, in both 2023 and 2025. 

Now, in recognition of his work, Badger Editions has commissioned Australian art historian, Ken McGregor, to compile a high-quality, 304-page, hardcover book – ELK, The Stencil Art of Luke Cornish – to give readers a detailed understanding of Luke’s artistic journey (available from the National Library, The National Portrait Gallery or via Luke’s website).

Luke was raised in Spence by his mother after his parents split up when he was five. One of three children, he has a twin sister, and an older sister and went to Miles Franklin Primary in Evatt, then Daramalan College and Melba Copland Secondary School.

Like many other young people, he finished school with no clear idea of what he was going to do with his life.

He didn’t paint as a kid, but he always drew, and just never considered art as a viable way to make a living.

“I just didn’t think I belonged in that world,” he recalls. “But then I haven’t found any other world that I belong in either.”

After school he tried dozens of different jobs – kitchen hand, gardener, labourer. He mowed lawns, weeded gardens, laboured and came home covered in concrete.

“I was just working to pay the rent and eat,” Luke says.

“In my twenties, like all my friends, I was going through the ‘sex, drugs and rock-and-roll’ phase, you know, work all week then party all weekend, recuperate all the next week, and do it again. “That’s what it was like in Canberra in the ’90s.”

One afternoon he casually picked up a piece of cardboard and a spray can of paint. On his back porch, Luke made a stencil of a guy with his arm’s crossed on the back of a wooden chair. He called it Here’s Tom with the Weather. 

The words typed on the side of the image said in part: “Today a young man on acid realises that all matter is merely energy condensed to slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness…”

He says: “I’m still the guy with the spray can on that porch. I’ve never changed.

“When people liked what I did, that gave me the confidence to do some more.”

That simple, commonsense decision encapsulates who the man the art world now recognises as ELK is.

There was no thought of going to art school to learn about art history, or the theory of colour, he just went into the shed and started teaching himself to paint.

“It was a hobby in the beginning,” he says. “I had to work fulltime to pay the bills, but as time passed, I found I was spending more time painting.

“I was just playing around, you know, doing paintings of rockstars and that sort of thing.”

But there was always a mix – an irreverent playfulness in some images; a dark, foreboding in others.

His debut solo show at The Front Gallery, in Lyneham, featured a cheeky image of a smiling chimp wearing a crown of thorns, but there were also lots of images of military apparel and weapons – snapshots of the American killing machine during the second Gulf War in Iraq.

At a pretty early stage, Luke started painting on public spaces around Canberra, but he never signed them.

Then, he was commissioned to paint some faces on the concrete walls near the fountain in the centre of town.

They were supposed to be on display for three months.

Twenty years later they are still a part of the landscape.

And street art is still a part of Luke Cornish.

In Canberra, in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, London, Paris, Ho Chi Minh City, Lorrach, Bucharest, Los Angeles and Brooklyn you will find ELK artwork. It will suddenly appear in a laneway, in a bricked up window, on massive concrete walls, and staircases.

Striking images that stop you in mid-stride and ask questions about how modern humans live, how free we really are and, most of all, about how much we care for each other.

Even when he’s playing there’s always a message in Luke’s art.

“To me, the most important thing for an artist is honesty,” he says.

“I don’t claim to have the answers. I’m just sharing my take on things, that’s all.”

“My mum always taught me to treat other people how I’d like to be treated myself; to be fair. That’s at the heart of everything I paint.”

And the observations he turns into art cut through.

The chaos of a Kowloon street scene jammed with people is a warning on overpopulation.

Children playing in the rubble of war-torn Syria ask questions about whether might is right.

As do, the stark, inhuman images of helmet-clad and masked soldiers carrying automatic rifles and loaded down with grenades.

A few years ago, after travelling overseas, Luke had a collection of foreign paper currency.

He mulched the money and used it to make paper for stencils featuring birds from around the world.

The message?

We care more about the destruction of the money (a legal offence) more than we do about the birds.

“Things feel really out of whack to me,” he says. “It’s even getting more dangerous to paint some of these things now to ask these questions.

“It’s like everybody is just being used. Controlled. For money.”

ELK – The Stencil Art of Luke Corish is available at the National Library, and The National Portrait Gallery or via Luke’s website: www.elkstencil.com