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| Sunday, 8 August 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Sarasaviya Film Festival on August 19
The festival in its 29th year of succession will include a film week beginning from August 11-17. The agenda includes 30 awards in addition to special awards for the most popular actor and actress along with cash awards amounting to five lakhs of rupees. The film awards will be given to 26 films selected from those that were screened in the year 2003. The Ranapala Bodinagoda Memorial Award will be given to a writer who has dedicated his life to the welfare of film industry. The Best Actress and Actor Awards will be selected with the readers choice through coupons that appear on the Sarasaviya weekly paper. The Rana Thisara Award will be given to two gifted writers who have dedicated their lifetime to welfare of film industry in our country. Seven films will be shown throughout the film week. Six will be awarded prizes through the decision of a panel of judges. These awards will go to Pura Sakmana, Sudu Kaluwara, Yakada Pihatu, Sulang Kirillee, Sakman Maluwa and Wekande Walawwa. Hitha Honda Pisso will be placed as the film that brought the highest income. The films shown throughout the week begin at 6 p.m. daily; and the actors and actresses who played the lead roles will make their presence at the beginning of each show. The Sarasaviya paper along with its readership will celebrate its 41st anniversary along with the film festival. A special invitee for the show is the film producer Adhul
Gopalakrishnan who is expected to grace the occasion. Germany celebrates Bawa's creativity The German Architecture Museum is celebrating for the first time the whole work of Geoffry Bawa, who died last year, in a major exhibition that got under way on July 24 and will continue until October 17.
The exhibition is being produced with the full help and encouragement of the Lunuganga Trust which administers Bawa's affairs and has the support of the Government of Sri Lanka, the accountants Ernst and Young and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. It is financed by the City of Frankfurt and the accountants Ernst and Young. Bawa is regarded as having been one of the most important and influential Asian architects of the twentieth century. His significance was confirmed in 2001 when he received the special chairman's award in the eighth cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, becoming only the third architect and the first non-Moslem to be so honoured since the award's inception. Bawa came late to architecture, only qualifying at the age of thirty-eight in 1957, but he soon established himself as the country's most prolific and inventive architect, establishing a whole canon of prototypes for buildings in a tropical Asian context. Although best known for his private houses and hotels, his portfolio also included schools and universities, factories and offices, public buildings and social buildings as well as the new Sri Lanka Parliament. Bawa's work is characterised by a sensitivity to site and context. He produced 'sustainable architecture' long before the term was coined, and had developed his own 'regional modernist' position. His designs breakdown the barriers between inside and outside, between building and landscape. One of Bawa's most impressive achievements has been the garden at
Lunuganga which he has slowly fashioned for himself from an abandoned
rubber estate over a period of fifty years. The result is a series of
outdoor rooms conceived with an exquisite sense of theatre as a civilised
wilderness set within the greater garden of Sri Lanka. A life in art
George Beven, one of Sri Lanka's most accomplished painters, will be celebrating his 75th birthday with a Solo exhibition titled People and Places and the launch of George Beven - A life in Art at the Lionel Wendt on August 24. Beven achieved his place in the hierarchy of art through a seemingly endless odyssey and discovery which took him from a newspaper illustrator and fashion designer, an innovative finger painter in oils on rush mats, the fabricator of portraits executed with a toothbrush called monotones, to the painter of exotic and vibrant colours, that he is exhibiting at the Lionel Wendt Gallery. They are remarkable rendering of harmonies and movement, Sometimes sedate, at others ecstatic: resplendent images to stimulate the heart and mind.
Although Beven had been drawing and painting all his life, it was the Ceylon Observerthat gave him his first job, doing fashion drawings for the women pages and illustrating short stories. He became a professional artist. Beven immigrated to England in 1958 and now divides his time between London and Negombo, his home town. Beven will be showing 34 of his latest paintings People and Places
which is scheduled to continue till August 27, 2004. The exhibition will
be open from 10 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. The book George Beven, A life in art, is
written by Neville Weeraratne. Trails of Serendib Dina Fernando will be holding her second solo exhibition of her paintings, the trails of Serendib at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery on August 14 and 15. The exhibition will be opened by Professor Senaka Bandaranayake on the 13th at 6.30 p.m.
Her favourite media is oil and she says, that by using oil on canvas one could play on colours. In all her work; none of which are repeats, Dina has adopted a style which is unique to her. She says that she received inspiration from works of Leonado da Vinci, Monet and our own Senaka Senanayake. There are 47 paintings in all and they feature a variety of themes ranging from land and seascapes to still life studies, figures, birds and semi abstracts. Dina teaches Art to 6-12 year students at the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo 7. She also teaches English Sunday School at the local Methodist Church in addition to being actively involved in other activities of the church. |
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The Sarasaviya Film Festival will take place on August 19 at the
Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall in Colombo at 6.30
p.m.
On display are plans, photographs, modells, films and furniture and
produces original ambience with cloth, art and materials of Sri Lanka, a
tropical touch in the Museum.
Dina a former pupil of St. Paul's Girls School Milagiriya started
painting from the age of 13 years. She first started painting using water
colours and then took to oil on canvas and later widened her versatility
in Arts. She is now very well adept in media other than oil and water
colours, having adopted her own techniques in soft pastels and charcoal.
Her drawings have been done on canvas, recycled paper, water colour paper
and pastel paper.
