Back to his art
He had no family background in art, yet Gunadasa Wathuwelagedara’s spontaneous passion for drawing and painting was evident when he was a student at Vijaya College, Matale.
Today the veteran painter and art scholar is 88. Ten years after his last solo exhibition he is ready for another exhibition featuring 26 paintings in mixed media on canvas and a set of black and white drawings.
Gunadasa’s paintings range from abstract to semi abstract. Pix by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
His style of painting goes from abstract to semi-abstract. A regular at the George Keyt Foundation’s annual art exhibitions he defines his style to be unique in some way. “I do not follow any fashionable trend of art or school of thought. I start with a blank mind with the white canvas staring at me,” he says, explaining that his focus is the process of painting rather than the final result.
Having enjoyed visiting famous art galleries in the world in London, Bombay and Tokyo he laments the lack of art galleries and free spaces to admire art in Sri Lanka.
Gunadasa followed an advanced course in drawing and painting at the Government College of Fine Arts. Renowned artist David Paynter was his ‘Guru Deva’, the mentor who inspired him.
In 1959, he won the Best Student’s scholarship to follow a course in graphic design at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. He received the National Diploma in Design specializing in Commercial Art, a discipline which was largely used for marketing and business purposes. Controversy was rife over the term ‘commercial art’ back. In that era sans computers, Gunadasa still remembers drawing flyers and posters by hand. “It was mostly designing for printing, artistic in a way, to create your best to lure the attention of the people,” he says.
On his return to Sri Lanka, Gunadasa pioneered a course of studies in graphic designing at the Government College of Fine Arts in the early 1960s. Many were interested in this new subject and there was a huge demand in the business field. Visual projections ranging from flyers, posters, pamphlets, logos, trademarks to book covers were included in graphic designing for advertising and PR.
A pioneer graphics man
Gunadasa went on to do another graphic design course at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and Pratt Institute, New York and worked as an advertising art director at J.Walter Thompson Advertising Agency, Colombo and Hindustan Thompson Company, Bombay (Mumbai).
But missing the satisfaction of art purely for art’s sake, he took a break, moving to Kandy to focus more on drawing.
A former visiting lecturer in design at the universities of Visual and Performing Art and Moratuwa also conducting a course in graphic design at the Australian College of Business and Technology, Colombo, Gunadasa now devotes his time to painting.
“I never title my paintings and instead leave the viewers to interpret them freely,” he says.
Gunadasa Wathuwelagedara’s exhibition of drawings and paintings will be at the J.D.A. Perera Gallery, Horton Place, Colombo 7 on July 11, 12 and 13.