Early forays into the wild gave wings to this birder-artist
A fine eye for detail: Lester’s works and left, the artist. Pix by Akila Jayawardena
For Lester Perera, his love for nature was bred in his genes. This keen birder known for his avian portraits where his subjects sit against a backdrop of foliage, lichen or spreading roots, had a grandfather, who as a station master was addicted to the wilds and a father, a keen hunter, who took him to the wilderness with his dogs in rural Dambulla and Wellawaya.
In Lester’s new exhibition titled Avian Narratives, at the Curado Art Space, we see the attention to detail – the cathedral like light streaming through forest canopy, the background of remote Himalayan hillscapes, the minute study of ferns and undergrowth…
It was in the 1970s that Lester first got interested in birds. There were no books for keen birders (only G. M. Henry’s works, as Vincent Legge’s A History of the Birds of Ceylon was priced beyond reach). Sketching was thus imperative and so began a long saga.
Lester ‘likes all birds’ but it was seabirds he has made a special study of, having done the first ever survey of our seabirds with Anouk Illangakoon in 2009. He is especially known for his mass migration studies of the Bridled Tern and the Swinhoe’s storm petrel.
In the upstairs gallery of Curado is a select array of works he ‘would never sell if I had the money’- including careful profile studies of juvenile owls from his garden, hauntingly Chinese-style black and whites, and quaint works where owls peep inconspicuously from the medieval ruins of Polonnaruwa statues and stupas to highlight another of his concerns as important as conservation – that our glorious history must be preserved.
Lester is totally against learning art in an academic setting and believes formal instruction restricts or ‘puts one in a box’. He encourages rather to use the ‘left side of our brain’– ‘we should really all be bipolar’, he guffaws.
Apart from being a bird artist Lester is also an authority on the history of bird art, and he could tell you all about how Legge’s magisterial book was assembled by artist John Gerrard Keulemans, a Dutch prodigy working for the British Museum. Legge would shoot birds in remote wild places in Ceylon and send them through a relay of ‘runners’ to a railways station, and thence to Colombo and the British Museum.
Lester has many riveting bird stories, and tells us a few with a raconteur’s flair. One of his most memorable rendezvous was in the isolated landscape of Ladakh with a kestrel and two Eurasian mapies soaring against purple hills. The story behind it is arduous – trekking more than 4500 metres above sea level- in the thin air stopping to puff every five metres’.
In search of the very rare Western Tragopan in the Himalayas, he would scale vertiginous heights and in Taiwan, he was rewarded for another climb with a rare sighting of a group of Mikado pheasants – three plump females and two males in their imperial blue plumage and stunning scarlet eye-patches.
Having worked in the Bundala National Park conserving turtles from 1996 to 1998, Lester recalls how, after an exhausting day, he would just spread out his foldable mat and sleep on the beach under stars – only to “suddenly wake up to see bright sunlight, and sometimes an elephant some 15 meters away feeding tranquilly.”
Lesser known is that Lester is a veteran tour guide whether leading tourists on tiger trails or bird tours in the subcontinent. Birding as a profession he says however, is dying. “In anything there are cycles, and I think the professional bird-watching cycle is ending”- every word of guidance being available at a fingertip on your mobile phone from easy identification to birdcall.
Lester has exhibited more abroad than in Sri Lanka, having dazzled in France, London, Scotland, Leicestershire and China.
Says Lester, “I will continue to paint, which is a therapeutic exercise for me and continue my small efforts at conservation of all nature.”
Avian Narratives is on at the Curado Art Space, Park Road, Colombo 5, until August 12, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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