The drawings of Chandana Ranaweera

by Ashley Halpe

When I first encountered the art of Chandana Ranaweera some years ago found he was adventurous explorer of possibilities. He had begun his career as a poet of the line, drawing with great skill and assurance and, at the same time imaginative audacity.

He had then developed a greater command of technical resources and was using them to create a family of distinctive images. He had developed a distinctive vocabulary and was exploring the medium itself in addition to his voyages of the imagination.

He has now returned in the current exhibition to the line, using it with new sophistication and frequent unexpectedness. We often have the whimsical mouths and noses and staring eyes of the early period, now devoted mainly to observations of the world he saw around him, though there are also some refreshing flights of imagination. In all the drawings a superb use of space gives the maximum value to the spare lines and taut figures.

In Vandana, the drawing of the figure on the left catches the feeling of devotion perfectly, while the figure on the right expresses a more formal piety. The oneness of lovers is suggested in many drawings of couples by the overlapping of lines and limbs and the merging of bodies.

But in Yuvala (Couples) this mergings is rendered with a dry amusement at the possessiveness that sometimes passes for togetherness: two juicily pendulous breasts look as if they could belong to either figure, and the male of the duo gazes round-eyed at the self-absorbed female.

An incredibly spaced out landscape next swins into view, it is beneath a spider-web-rayed sun. Perhaps behind than clump of trees those women at the large rabana of the next piece are thumping in the New Year (this group is rendered with marvellous economy).

Two gormless-looking women in beach wear stroll past. Hardly has one savoured the artist's amusement than his imagination bodies forth three gods, seemingly with one body between them, and all apparently about to ride one vahana, an absurdly small peacock whose tailfan has been stripped down to a single feather, the eye of the artist gazing askance at it.

A whole series of musicians playing in pairs brings out the camaraderie and yet competitive elan of interactive performance. In our musical tradition, such pairs of players seemingly challenge each other and "cap" each other's burst of rhythm and melody. Chandana Ranaweera evokes the life of these interactions with the puffed cheeks of nala blowers and the body language of the drummers caught with a touch of comedy.

Chandana Ranaweera brought these drawings before the public in an extremely interesting exhibition at Alawwa after nearly two decades of devotions to his art. To his art and also to his teaching.

He is a devoted and caring teacher who has often supplied his charges with art materials besides stimulating them by his own creativity and helping them to develop their skills and repertoire. Several of his student have won award in national and international competitive exhibitions.

All this is achieved despite battles with illness and bouts of depression. Chandana Ranaweera pays the price that is so often required of the creative and the imaginative in our midst. He journeys on indomitably to give us the privilege of sharing these insights into our reality and glimpses into a rare world of the imagination, always rendered with refined skill.