Chandana’s line drawings

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”
- John W. Gardner

In this week’s column, we examine the art of line drawing and the creation of a prominent artist who, over the years, mastered line drawings with distinctive Sri Lankan artistic motifs.

It is pertinent here to look at the drawing as a form of major visual and art and how it profoundly affects the human aesthetic consciousness.

Drawing is a major form of visual art that uses diverse material to produce two-dimension medium. Some of the categories of drawing include figure drawing, cartooning and doodling. The methods of drawings also vary from line drawing, stippling, shading and the surrealist methods of entopic graphomania. This is the method by which dots are made at the sites of impurities on a blank sheet of paper and the lines are, then, drawn between the dots. Another method of drawing is tracing in which drawings are made on a translucent paper such as tracing paper around outlines of earlier known shapes that show through the paper.

History of drawings

Although no one is certain about the exact time the drawing came into being, sketches and paintings have been produced from prehistoric times. The cave and rock paintings bear testimony to the earliest form of drawings such as those found in Aurignacian period, approximately 40,000 years ago, in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain.

Chandana Ranaweera

By the 12th and 13th centuries, the art flourished in the form of illuminated manuscripts on vellum and parchments in monasteries throughout the Europe. The monks who drew these illuminated manuscripts used lead styli to draw lines for their writings and for the outlines of their illuminations. Artist began to use silver to make drawings and underdrawings. At the initial stages, the artist used and re-used wooden tablets with prepared ground for drawings. With the paper came into being by the 14th century, artists made drawings for both studies and finished work on paper.

Line drawings

Line drawing is a unique art which expresses, among other things, the individuality of the artist in terms of carefully-drawn images in lines. The image in Line Art is made up of distinct straight and curved lines placed against a (usually plain) background, without gradations in shades or hue (colour) to represent two-dimensional or three-dimensional object.

Although Line art is usually monochromatic, sometimes artists use lines of different colours for Line drawings. The rudimentary emphases of the Line art are form and outline, over colour, shading, and texture. There are instances the artist may use areas of solid pigments and dots in addition to lines in a line drawing. Line Art may use in caricature, cartoon, ideograph, or glyph.

Line Art was the standard form of illustrations, well before the invention of photography and of halftones, to be used in print publications in black ink on white paper. The Line Artist used either stippling or hatching, shades of gray for their line drawings. In essence, Line Art is the rudimentary form of art. A significant characteristic of Line Art is that it indicates the edge of a two-dimensional (Flat) shape or a three-dimensional form. A shape in a Line Drawing may be indicated by means of an outline and three-dimensional form by contour lines.

Chandana’s signature

A significant aspect of Chandana’s line drawing is that his is highly influenced by Buddhist art and the temple paintings. This aspect is unique in the sense that it is, indeed, rare that a distinct style of line drawings evolved drawing inspiration from Buddhist art. Chandana Ranaweera who learnt art from his father, proved his mettle earlier on during his school days at Maliyadeva College Kurunegala.

Chandana commenced with collage drawings and subsequently shifted to Line Art. He, primarily, draws inspiration from Buddhist art and his major themes include images of the Buddha, diverse deities, Buddhist monks and objects of nature such as moon, stars, flowers, sea and shore.

His composition of image is unique in that he amply uses not only black lines in a mess but also shapes such as that of bo-leaf as a backdrop to an image of the Buddha in standing form. In drawing deities such as Gana Devi, he uses white background with sharp-edged lines. In a way, Chandana’s line drawings are unique in his treatment of subjects and the use of lines.

It is obvious that over the years, Chandana has evolved his diction of lines. The language, thus evolved principally out of Buddhist art, is capable not only to represent plain objects such as statue of the Buddha or images of deities but it also takes a complex in depicting human behaviour, particularly, in natural calamities such as tsunami. In treating subjects such as moon-lit night over the Pagoda, Chandana uses the most simplistic grammar of Line Art. What is significant is that artist employs white in an economical manner drawing the principal objects of the scene such as moon, stars, the flower altar and the Pagoda.

Although he may be influenced by well –developed Line Art tradition in the West and major works in the genre, his creations bear distinct artistic motifs of contemporary Sri Lankan art. His language is born out of the Buddhist civilisation and its rich artistic legacy.