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| Sunday, 02 April 2006 |
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ARTBeat: Armchair for tired minds by Aditha Dissanayake
I am surprised at the request Vincent Liyanage makes when I meet him to find out more about his upcoming exhibition Pravarthanaya at the Lionel Wendt on April 7, 8 and 9. Before I can begin the usual line of questions, he gives a piece of paper to me and asks me to draw a few lines on it. Recalling the definition of a line as a dot that went for a walk, I draw three lines and watch in amazement how he turns the lines into the figure of a woman clad in a cloth and jacket who looks over her shoulder at us with a smile on her face. Awed by the realization that I am in the presence of Ingenuity, it takes sometime to draw my eyes off the picture on the paper to begin the interview. Why had he chosen such a title for his exhibition? Beginning to explain that the word Pravarthanaya is associated with the Dharma Chakra, he breaks off in mid-sentence and begins to concentrate on another set of lines he asks me to draw which he rapidly transforms into the figure of a Buddha in meditation. Watching him at work, it seems like an overstatement when he recalls how the students and the Principal of Stella Maris College in Chennai had been spellbound when they saw him creating his line drawings. They had stared at him in total disbelief. Thushnimbootha wela balan hitiya.
Saying he became an artist because he abhors politics, Liyanage explains that to him politics is another word for fraud. Calling himself a rebellion he says he is at his best when he is among the downtrodden masses, whom he calls "duk vidina minissu". Getting back to his paintings, he cites the words of Rev. Dr. Aloysius Pieris, s.j as the best critic of his work. "The rustic interior of Asia which has both the natural and human resources for a regeneration of society, has not yet been revealed in its fullness. Vincent Liyanage discovers it for us through simple lines that run along the contours of the rural environment of his native Sri Lanka with its peasant values and its slow but steady pace of life". The fifty paintings displayed at the Lionel Wendt is evidence of Vincent's claim that he has never made a politically didactic painting in his life. Fifteen minutes surrounded by Vincent's sublime work is guaranteed to "sooth the mind of every mental worker... (to quote Matisse) like a good arm chair". Pravarthanaya is at the Lionel Wendt from April 7 to 9. |
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A self-taught artist, Liyanage says the walls of his home vouch for his
inborn talent to create line drawings. Preferring the jungles of the Vanni
to living in Colombo, he shuns publicity because as he says in jest "the
higher a monkey climbs the more his bottom becomes visible". 
