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Showing posts from August, 2022

Traces of the Art Educator and the Artist W. A Ariyasena (1931 - 2022)

  This text is dedicated to an extraordinary art teacher, former faculty (Department of Painting, Faculty of Visual Arts) and a modern painter in Sri Lanka W.A. Ariyasena who died at 91 (?) on August 8, 2022.  When I heard the news about the death of this wonderful personality, it took me back to some traces that he left on his journey. An object ( a large blue colour container) that I saw at his studio in 2020 is not a work of art that he intentionally created, but it is something that the artist left during the act of painting as an unconscious habit of mark making. These energetic traces of his gestures embodying his presence and absence in the present context is the hidden energy of his language of art and teaching. His conversation was always full of arts, literature, music and cinema that he absorbed by travelling around Europe and living in the discourse of his contemporaries (J.D.A Perera, Mahagamasekara, David Paynter, Stanley Abesinghe, H.A. Karunarathne, Albert Dhar...