Plus

Plus

Threading a picture
By Natasha Fernandopulle
The art of painting with the needle: has the thought even crossed your mind? But painting with a needle, is indeed possible, as Kusuma Hettiarachchi has proved. Looking at her intricate work with the needle, one would undoubtedly be amazed because it does look like a painting.

It all started in school for this great grandmother long years ago. "I was good in sewing" she smiles. When she was at Musaeus College sewing was a subject and at the end of every year, she recalls how the sewing inspectress, Mrs. Evans would come around to inspect what they had done. "It was called the annual sewing inspection. "Once I left school and started teaching I hardly had time for sewing but it was always a hobby," Mrs. Hettiarachchi said. "Throughout my life, I also enjoyed bird watching," she said.

Then came retirement and she started making use of her talent to depict birds. She would make her own sketches and enlarge the little pictures, as photocopying was unheard of. Now she uses the needle and thread to 'paint' landscapes. A few years after her retirement, her eldest son had taken some of her needle paintings to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and officials there had identified her work as an ancient needle art, 'needle painting', dating back to the 13th and 14th Centuries, in England. "I seemed to have stumbled upon an ancient method,” she says quite proudly.

Needle painting, she says, involves the long and short stitch. It is a matter of merging and mixing the colours and reproducing the picture as best as one can, she says.If she feels the colour is not right, she will unpick the whole area and start over again!

She has had many requests to teach this fine art and many have even asked if they can come and watch her working but she has said no. "I have worked to timetables all my life. I want my time to be exactly my own,” she says. Mrs. Hettiarachchi's exhibition of 40 needle paintings will be on at the Lionel Wendt Gallery on April 28, 29 and 30.

Back to Plus