The National Trust will present Tilak Samarawickrema, artist, designer and architect, in its monthly lecture series delivering a talk on “Andare in Art and Film”. The presentation, broader in scope than the title hints, will trace the evolution of Samarawickrema’s line drawings (1969 - 1987) as they began with his doodling habit as a young architect and developed into a serious art form during his 12-year sojourn in Italy where he lived and worked as an artist.
Samarawickrema has exhibited his work in international art galleries in Rome, Milan, New York and Brazil. His art is known best in Sri Lanka through his first book “Andare`” published in Italy in the early 1980s. In 2009, Samarawickrema published Ink of Lanka, a comprehensive retrospective of his line drawings.
Inspired by the curves of Sinhala calligraphy, Samarawickrema’s art contains an interplay of line and space. In the preface of Andare, Pierre Restany, the renowned French art critic, describes Samarawickrema’s drawings as “a pure, lyrical extrapolation from this form of writing”, “..the calligraphy is the image of your language. The tale (Andare) itself follows the sensual, sinuous curves of the letters.”
The kinetic energy in Samarawickrema’s drawings allowed the artist to give the line a temporal dimension by extending it to animated cinema.
His film “Andare of Sri Lanka”, produced by Corona Cinematografica, Rome, represented Italy at the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany in 1978. This film, which has not been screened in Sri Lanka for over two decades, will be shown at the presentation.
In the 1970’s the film was produced in cell animation where 24 frames had to be drawn for a movement of one second. Forty years later, employing digital technology, Samarawickrema is producing dance sequences from his line drawings. These short clips will also be screened at the lecture.
He will also show visuals of his latest rendering of his drawings into a new medium, where he has translated his art into towering wire sculptures. The National Trust will host the event at the Post Graduate Institute of Archaeological Research, 407 Bauddhaloka Mawatha, Colombo 7 on June 24 at 6.30 p.m. |
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