The importance of being Segar
Segar’s latest one man show opened on Friday and is on this weekend at the Lionel Wendt Gallery.
The artist, is the painter of the ‘indoor’ hardly emerging ‘outdoor’ to capture images on canvas. Rather, he depends upon figures to express the art of painting.
With the power of modern dissonance, his brush strays away from impressionism towards a more formidable combination of contemporary, modern and abstract visualisation. Segar only paints figures and their kind and appears to possess an infinite adoration for religious figures. Among many I saw Confused Composer twice over, Fishmongers both men and women, Dark nights of Jesus Christ, Unknown saints and Gospel writers etc.
Most of them are being featured in his new autobiography titled Dialogue with Darkness.
The painting of Confused Composer was my pick for the day. This watercolour vision done in 2004 and over 18 years ripe, retained the old gold, dusky brown grading to black streaks in a rhapsody of reverence to the sage. In contrast, Lord Ganesh done this year with oil on canvas vibrant with shades of orange, yellow and brown has Tamil scripts which says though you opened your third eye, you are still the same old Ganesha.
When Segar painted The Aragalaya (Struggle) commissioned by an art lover in the United States, he had a kaleidoscopic haze in mind that he lightly transferred into canvas capturing the ardour of the ‘Go home Gota’ protests. Here abstract expressionism dallied with his painter’s feelings towards their treatment.
Very abstract at one point, straying towards cubism the next, he has all options at his fingertips and the brush never lets him down. He has the capacity to blend and overlap colours and produce vibrance. There is also one distinct feature in his figures – the way some expressions boil down to terror in the eyes. They are demanding, piercing and penetrating even to the extent of creating fear in the mind of the observer.
The Friends in watercolour had a softer gentler effect. The doe-eyed female figure’s friendship with the beast spelled a tale of love for the dumb. Beautiful and striking enough to grace the principal wall of an auditorium.
None of his paintings is autobiographical, at least not to my knowledge. His artistic work has great joy and appears at varied stages that of a restless spirit.
Did I also encounter a little morbidness but then artists have varying moods when they sit down to paint and subconsciously, it is there on canvas.
All in all Segar is a great artist and needs an international platform to expose his creativity. Is it not time that our sleeping missions abroad did some canvassing and exposure on Sri Lankan art?
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