That timeless Lankan touch
Nadine David’s art takes you back to a more leisurely era, when the likes of David Paynter (her teacher) borrowed the earthy shades of Lanka’s rural soul to paint her dusky people; celebrate ehela trees in full bloom; the quiescent lapis lazuli sea of Ruhuna; and the beauty of village damsels…
There is also a touch of the ‘43 Group, and the likes of Justin Daraniyagala and Harry Pieris, people she had the good fortune to know when young, as they were all at school with her father, Robin Lesley Rutnam (sometime Chairman of the Leather and Plywood Corporation).
Lunch Hour: 1966
With this timeless Lankan touch, Nadine, though she had always shunned the limelight and courted “the quiet”, is one of the island’s best-known art teachers today.
A Song of Praise, her exhibition is now on at the Paradise Road Galleries and Nadine at four score years, exhibiting after a lapse of more than 20 years, is spry and elegant with the complexion of her Canadian grandmother, the famous Dr. Mary Rutnam, the leftist suffragist livewire who was a quintessential part of 1920s Colombo society.
As a girl, Nadine’s father fired the artist in her – “feeding” her with “one drawing book a day.” Aged 11, she left Holy Family Convent Bambalapitiya and went to England with her mother who accompanied her elder sister to the Elmhurst Ballet School, where little Nadine too had to pirouette and petit point (not willingly at first).
Nadine David: Emphasising beauty in a world always ‘dashing’ in a rat race. Pic by Akila Jayawardena
She was 15 when they came back abruptly as foreign exchange could not be sent to put her to art school, and her father enrolled her at the Heywood Institute here under his old friend, David Paynter, who was then principal.
She was an external student and wasn’t allowed to paint (only draw) the first three years. Soon however, Paynter who hated the whole setting at the government school retired to a farm in the jungle in Trincomalee – and Nadine would also follow.
The six months there were the “best time in her entire life. I was running around in the jungle and painting with David Paynter”.
The jungle was as yet wild and the Nilaveli beach pristine, with Fort Frederick where deer grazed and colourful kovils with haunting nadaswaram music.
Before this, when in England Nadine had been the acolyte of artist Gill Smith, who took her to the big London galleries, including the National Gallery and the Tate, on the back of her Vespa bike, including the big exhibition when Picasso passed away.
Gill’s insistence on critical studies meant Nadine looked at art and had to not just say ‘oh, it was good’, but explain also why it was good.
While Nadine paints a lot of nature today, it is not all idyllic scenery with her. She doesn’t want to “dwell on suffering” but she believes it must be brought out as it is pretty much out there. Hence works like The Lunch Hour (1965) – inspired by a group of mendicants outside St. Anthony’s Kochchikade, showing a widow with shorn hair and no jewellery as Tamils widows of a certain era had to be…
Ehala at mid day: 2007
It is no surprise Nadine is also a lover of dance. As the younger sister of Anne Captain (the dancer and golfer) she recalls the time she fell in love with the vibrancy of eastern dance. She saw Charmaine Vanderkoen (who was to become a relative later) dance with Sesha Palihakkara, and thus got into Bharata Natyam, Katak and traditional Sri Lankan dance.
Whether in dance or art, Nadine is curiously influenced by Sigiriya and its murals which she visited after Ajanta so she was able to appreciate the colours and the line better.
Her Indian husband-to-be, Priya Manohar David, she met at Heywood. He played the tabla and was learning art under Paynter but was a writer, also reading English at university. Paynter did not want Nadine to marry (probably because of fears her art would get neglected) but when he heard who she was to marry, he approved – “he’s very good; he will support.”
Manohar was a part of most of her nature portraits as he would sit with her whether in the remote scrub jungle or the hills or the beach. In fact their honeymoon Nadine laughs was to “Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Sigiriya, Trinco – my husband was very happy to go along.”
The men in her life have always supported her. Her eldest son has every one of her paintings on his phone “even the ones I have now lost”, while her grandson is now her “technical advisor”.
The most rewarding thing in her life remains her students, among them professional artists like Dillai Joseph Rodrigo and Shaanea Mendis D’Silva. “…they still love me – that’s the most wonderful thing. They come to me, they argue with me, fight with me. We’re friends.”
She thinks it is her duty as an artist to open eyes to beauty in a world always ‘dashing’ in a rat race. Looking at her work in her sanctum away from the hustle and bustle – the depictions of nature, timeless scenery and resting figures– it is easy to agree.
A Song of Praise is on at the Paradise Road Galleries from December 12 till January 8 from 10 a.m. till midnight.
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