My name is Dumith Kulasekara. I was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As an artist, I have also been involved in art education, art history, visual culture, and psychoanalytical studies of trauma, the body, and gender. My transdisciplinary research practice extends to curatorial and museum practices of Asian material culture through critical heritage studies. I focus on Sri Lankan cultural materials deterritorialized during colonialism and their cultural status within the post-colonial context. From 2009 to 2023, I was a full-time senior faculty member at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA) in Colombo. Between 2018 and 2021, I served as the Head of the Painting Department. During this time, I restructured the department’s curriculum, creating a comprehensive four-year undergraduate program in drawing and painting. I am also the founder and author of the Museum of Visual Arts (MOVA) projects, which include the 19th-century cast collection at the faculty and an architectural project transforming the faculty’s oldest building into the MOVA. As an artist for over twenty years, my primary focus has been drawing and painting. Through my studio work, writing, and curatorial projects, I explore themes of trauma, memory, psyche, gender, and the body within personal, ecological, and social contexts. My creative response to the past and present is deeply influenced by childhood memories of the civil war violence between 1988 and 1989. These reflections were further intensified by the nation’s thirty-year war culture and a personal turning point in 2008 when my mother became a victim of a terrorist bombing, making my thematic explorations even more complex. I am a 2014 Fulbright Scholar and hold an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, as well as a BFA (First Class Honors) from UVPA. My research and educational background includes experiences at the Ashmolean Museum (University of Oxford), UC Davis, Kyung Hee University, and the Korea National University of Arts.
an Artist looking at an Artist George Keyt: A Portrait of the Artist by Albert Dharmasiri If I am not mistaken, I first met Professor Albert Dharmasiri in 2005 when I was a second-year student at the department of painting. Albert Dharmasiri who was the first Professor in Painting taught the courses in life drawing and life painting at the department. He had experiences of teaching and being in the highest academic bodies at UVPA nearly for four decades. One day, I remembered he came to the studio for life painting sessions with a book on one of the most celebrated figurative painters of all time Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011). He talked about the beauty of paint application in his nudes painting. In particular, the poses of the human body that Freud depicted were appreciated by Professor Dharmasiri. And in one of his drawing sessions, Professor Dharmsiri said that “look at the inner rhythmical structure of the human body, as you can see it in leaves...”. Albert Dharmasiri stud...