Farewell

As always Vincent Liyanage talks in parables. Listening to him is like reading Aesop's Fables. When I meet him last Monday, he shows me a piece of paper with a black dot on it.

What do you see? He asks me. A black dot". "No" he shakes his head in disappointment. "What about all the white on the page? Why did you see only the small black dot?" White represents the good, black, the bad. It is sad that most people see only the bad side of things all the time. What about all the good in this world?" He asks me.

Having completed his hundredth painting at the Bellanvila Rajamaha Vihara, Liyanage says he feels it is time to leave the shores of his motherland to take up a lecture post in Canada.

A self-taught artist who has always preferred the jungles of the Vanni to living in Colombo, he recalls how difficult his journey as an artist had been. "There were times when I did not have enough money to feed my children or to pay their school fees. But I didn't give up painting, or succumb to those who tried to influence me with their money".

The results? Rev. Dr. Aloysius Pieris best sums up the work of this artist, whose absence from now on is bound to be a great loss in the arena of local art. "The rustic interior of Asia which has both 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".

Aditha