Finding the path to his own artistic awakening
Wasantha Namaskara’s art adorns the walls of the Paradise Road Gallery depicting fleeting states of mind.
Wasantha has come a long way from his village in Badulla, handpicked from the anonymity of the Kala Pola down Green Path by Udayshanth Fernando, Chairman of Paradise Road, today the whole serene gallery dedicated to his talent with the new exhibition titled Bhawana.
Wasantha is still a bit dazed by this Cinderella-like transformation but wholly unassuming. He takes me back to his beginnings, when, a boy at Eheliyagoda Central College, he had ridden a bus to Colombo just to see George Keyt. Bewildered by the city, the youth got to the Lionel Wendt at six in the evening sweaty and disoriented, to snatch a glimpse of his hero at a distance as the exhibition was over by that time…
Exploring the state of his mind: Meditation leads to new form of art. Pix by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Later Wasantha was to enter the portals of Sri Jayewardenepura University where he read sociology and anthropology, his creative mind fascinated by the mysteries of human culture and religion. At the same time, as always fascinated by art, he found time to attend the new Vibhavi art academy of Chandraguptha Thenuwara, just back from Russia where he had studied painting.
Wasantha Namaskara
However, as the name of the exhibition Bhawana (meditation) suggests, the current style of art exhibited at Paradise Road was not exactly moulded in an atelier but came from deep within, a spiritual rapping at the door of Wasantha’s psyche.
It happened when, enamoured by India, Wasantha would go there on a whim, and just drift around. He loved visiting the painted caves of Ajanta and Ellora, and that temple to erotic art, Khajuraho, absorbing the ancient culture and art.
It was with no real intention of meditating that he put up for ten days at the Dhammagiri Vipassana Academy in Igatpuri, but his ‘guru-ji’ there convinced him to observe the practices and soon a ‘great change’ was wrought.
The training, says Wasantha, taught him to observe his own ever-changing mind. From then on he was to shed his old style. What naturally came to him from that point were abstracts where he captures his state of mind at the given moment, rendered into vivid canvases.
While earlier he drew mostly Keyt-like curvy female figures or landscapes where lush vegetation in hues of green pleasantly fill the frame, now he is ‘very happy’ to have discovered this new style which was what he had been always looking for. His is the incandescent joy of expressing faithfully his innermost emotions.
Wasantha doesn’t sign his art on the front because each painting can make sense when viewed with any of the four sides upwards. Art he says, is like breathing for him. Apart from Keyt he has been inspired by Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin.
He doesn’t mince words about the fact that he is happy and thankful about the immense change brought over by being picked up by Shanth. His deepest ambition which was to display his art properly he says, has been achieved.
Bhawana will be on at the Paradise Road Gallery until April 24, from 10a.m. till midnight.
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