Strokes that speak volumes
On the verge of two deaths
It was a maverick start for maverick art: Sujith Rathnayake grew up toddling amidst giant film cutouts, Vesak ‘pandals’ and wedding poruwas. Against the arid landscape of Hambantota, his father produced the kitsch commercial art so dear to the 1970s.
Sujith later went on to study art at the University of Kelaniya, and became a well-known expressionist wielding charcoal. September sees his new exhibition ‘Drafting Desire’ at the Barefoot Gallery – a unique collection of first drafts of art- sketches rather like black and white dreams caught unawares.
If you see something special in his work- like figures with beautiful musculature or extra life, you are perceptive: for Sujith began as a sculptor. The vocation of sculpting did not agree with him however because that lengthy process could not capture his often fleeting, transitory emotions. But the sketches which were the prototypes for his sculptures had extraordinarily good ‘value’ (an artistic term which means light- giving the feeling of volume and mass) so he decided to stick to these ‘sculpture sketches’- making a form of art out of it.
Sujith Rathnayake
Just like this current exhibition, his last solo show (in 2018) too focused on a technique rather than a specific social theme. Called One Continuous Line, that comprised exclusively art executed with just one line.
Born in Ranna, Hambantota, and schooled at Hungama Vijayaba Vidyalaya, Sujith grew up in the days of the JVP insurrections. Today, 49, married with one son, he is a fulltime artist.
With his own style of expressionism Sujith has inspired many younger artists. He has over time addressed many issues. His series on language for example reflects wryly on how we are today trapped by words and how words have ‘limited our freedom’.
This, he says, has affected artists themselves in a particular way. He laments that works of art are today given titles that sound like critiques themselves. “Great modern artists from Picasso to our ‘43 Group, gave simple titles to identify their art whereas today we go for such complexities as ‘anatomy of love’ and so on.”
He is critical of how art now has become a sub-category of architecture. While a veritable fortune is invested in university art education, graduates do not go on to create new art. They either go for conceptual works made from different material which though with powerful concepts lack emotions or go on to create mere ‘effects’ which they hire people to mass-produce.
My head hurts
It has become the trend to create a uniform ‘style’ of one’s own- a style which can cater- and play foil to- an existing style of architecture. Gone are what Sujith calls the combined ‘wonder’ of the emotions, fundamentals of art and the strokes.
For Sujith puts great value on the stroke – pencil or often in his case, the charcoal stroke. It is the stroke that speaks of the artist, an eloquent language that we are often ‘not sophisticated enough to read’. In painting or art done using other material, you do not sense the same character. This makes his exhibition of sketches all the more vital.
There is today no art culture, “only an art market” says Sujith. For an art culture to flourish, there should be an art community, and a discourse that comes with art history. “Culture comprises the art academy, the art gallery, art criticism, curation and education.” Such a vibrant ensemble no longer exists in the country, he believes.
For Sujith, good art should be organic and he does not believe in the luxury of taking breaks mid-work. He has to finish a piece ‘in one go’ because even a slight break means the flow is broken and the fragile connection between art and artist would snap.
Sujith’s Drafting Desire is on at the Barefoot Gallery from September 18 to October 10 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.