Laki – Sri Lanka’s modern day Da Vinci
View(s):Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
- “ Leonardo da Vinci ”
As a creator, the brilliance of mind and talent of Da Vinci was one which contributed inherently as a liberating influence to later generations of artists. Throughout history, it was always attempted to imitate this talent, but none have truly understood the essence behind his ingenuity.
Laki Senanayake – a man of creativity with a torrent of titles trailing behind his name, is one who causes outrage with the guilelessness of his nudes, his delight in the portrayal of the animal in nature, causing glorious scandal among cognoscenti for many years, has never attempted to replicate another. He is one who has taken up his own quest for knowledge within nature and has pledged to enlighten himself with noblest pleasures of understanding with what she offers. He is in-fact truly a ‘Modern Day Da Vinci’ with a spontaneous approach to art.
Emerging from the 1950s, a generation of innovation and origination in the Sri Lankan creative arts crowning over any period which followed, his artistic career began when he first exhibited with the Young Artists group in 1957 followed by his one-man show at the Lionel Wendt Gallery. Within Sri Lanka, his work is appreciated on a national level. The bravura central chandelier, conceived as a ceiling sculpture at Parliament is one out of the many distinguished artworks adorning a multitude of prominent landmark buildings around the country. His most famous work may perhaps be the metalwork’s sculpture along the grand staircase of the Lighthouse hotel in Galle.
He has not limited himself within the worldly gains that art has brought to him. His home in Dambulla since the early 1970s; Diyabubula, is a unique eco-retreat, a masterpiece by Laki himself showcasing his interests as a preservationist of the wilderness. His interest in creating mini-forests is another uncanny similarity to the works of Da Vinci who attempted to preserve the beauties of nature through his own representative thought processes. It is here that Laki plays with his talents as an Inventor, innovator, Landscaper and also as a Sculptor within the silence of nature that Da Vinci too believed to be the source of ‘true knowledge.’
His conceptualized thoughts process showcasing daring compositions and the creation of illusions can only be described as one which is a modern take of what Da Vinci had created with his futuristic approach.
This has been displayed in many instances in exhibitions such as; the St.Sebastian Series (1999), Abstracts and Landscapes (2002), The Lost Collection (2016) and more. All of these exhibitions and creations reveal yet another talent of Laki which is his thirst for knowledge. His times with renouwned minds in his youth, such as the Australian artist Donald Friend, architects Geoffrey Bawa and UlrikPlesner, landscape designer Bevis Bawa, fabric designers Ena de Silva and Barbara Sansoni and thinkers and writers such as Reggie Siriwardena and Senator R Nadesan have all allowed him to perfect his raw talents with surgical precision and magnify his variety of mediums of expression.
‘A Treasure Trove’ of Laki”s art brought this awe to us again with these silent sensations that scream with emotions, showcasing his expertise at expressing a ‘feverishly inventive imagination’ that had been expressed before only by Da Vinci , allows us to be safe in calling Laki Senanayake the Modern Da Vinci of creation. This has been reassured by the extensive accomplishment of the online bidding which had been successfully concluded with a hundred percent bidding on all the artwork which was listed.