Blossoming as an artist with hi-tech as her guru
Branching into wildlife art from portraits
It took Sanjeewani Wijewardhane her undergraduate years and Facebook to discover and be recognized for her artistic talent. The self-taught artist created a ripple in the international art scene back in 2015. Selected to showcase her work at a gallery in Singapore together with internationally acclaimed artists, Sanjeewani whose only teachers were YouTube and her own innovative mind has since been quietly exploring her potential.
When we meet Sanjeewani, the 30-year-old is in the midst of applying for a master’s programme in management. Ironically, Sanjeewani never studied art as a subject save the lessons given to students in lower grades. But she did enjoy the creative arts as a Kandyan dancer throughout her school career, even clinching the national title.
Drawing was always something she did as a hobby, portraits that she would try to capture as realistically as possible while studying at Holy Family Convent, Kurunegala. Following her A/L’s (in the commerce stream) Sanjeewani began a degree in Industrial Management at the National School of Business Management. It was during this time that she came across Italian artist Emmanuel Dascanio while scrolling on her newsfeed. His hyperrealistic artwork caught Sanjeewani’s attention. Enthralled by the uncannily real portraits of near photographic clarity, “I made that my target,” she explains.
Portrait of a lady
From that moment on Sanjeewani pored over tutorials and self-study, practising techniques and learning about artistic tools through YouTube, which she credits as her ‘teacher’. Her choice of subjects were celebrities- easy to recognize faces she painstakingly copied from high resolution images. Sanjeewani’s first attempt, a portrait of Columbian singer Shakira was however far from picture perfect. “It looked like a cartoon,” she giggles shaking her head. But it little deterred the motivated artist. Taking up the challenge she continued on her artistic adventure. Three years later, Sanjeewani’s portraits would find her working as a freelance artist while studying. Her art, now more assured, only fuelled her passion and confidence and by 2015, she had her own Facebook art page and was combining both her artistic and entrepreneurial skills for her final research as part of her degree.
“My school friends didn’t really know I had this talent,” and neither did most anyone else including the self-effacing artist, till other art lovers and encouraging strangers contacted and commented on her work online. Little would Sanjeewani know that a curator of an art gallery in Singapore would scroll through her work randomly on Facebook. “I was about to graduate,” she recalls, when a message popped in to her inbox in 2015 from the gallery which asked to display her work, but instead of the portraits she had by now mastered a technique for, the subjects they gave her were of a different kind, or rather, a different species altogether.
“I told them I would have to try,” she explains honestly. A little daunted by the task at hand- to draw portraits of hyper realistic wildlife was one she had never tried before- thus, all the more reason she was drawn to it. The trial picture they sent her- a herd of zebra drinking water took two weeks and 6 hours a day to complete. The end result would find her being selected as one of 30 international artists at a wildlife art exhibition in Singapore by the gallery.
Sanjeewani Wijewardhane. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Flying in for her very first exhibition let alone first international exhibition was both an enlightening and anxious experience for the then 28-year-
old. “At first they thought I was a professional,” she laughs recalling the more experienced artists’ amazement when she showed them how she used makeup brushes to blend and shade- innovative little techniques she would create and try out for herself. Bagging the award for best emerging artist was the icing on the cake, in addition to learning from her more senior international artistic peers.
These days, Sanjeewani, is slowly building her brand into a business- a dream she has envisioned for a while now. “I learned that if I really like something I can do it,” she says simply. While the aspects of marketing and lack of opportunity are some obstacles she feels artists here still have to endure, Sanjeewani is thankful to Facebook for propelling her into a community- where others reach out to her and she can reach out to other promising artists like herself. The messages that flood her inbox these days are akin to that of a gallery, full of criticism, praise and questions or requests for help from other amateur artists.
You can find her work on Facebook through her page The Art of Perception by Sanjeewani Wijewardhane.