The face is his forte

An artist with a different style, a different concept...Sampath Amunugama sketches striking human figures. Rather intricate though his paintings and drawings may seem at a glance, his art has a vital link to day-to-day life of human beings, which itself is complex, he says.

Love, affection, hopes and dreams, religion and culture, all provide subject material for Sampath who identifies himself as an artist who prefers, more than anything else, to draw paintings where he is able to explore human emotions and thereby speak out about the human mind.

“Since I speak about the human mind, my paintings concentrate on human faces. What an individual always does is not what he feels. Man changes constantly- his feelings, his thoughts are subjected to change. I try to express this in my paintings. Therefore some of my paintings may consist of attractive faces while others may be contorted and complex,” he said. Born in 1975, in Kandy, Sampath who did his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, University of Kelaniya in 2004 and the Post graduate Diploma in Archaeology at the Post Graduate Institute of Archaeology, University of Kelaniya teaches art at S. Thomas’ College Mount Lavinia.

Sampath Amunugama’s exhibition now on at the Paradise Road Gallaries continues till April 18.