Children’s faces the focus of Jayantha’s Expressions-17
Jayantha Silva, an old boy of St. Peter’s College, Bambalapitiya, has always been a doodler. His Montessori teacher would say on his report card that he was excellent at art but “unfortunately he doesn’t draw on paper – only walls and floors”.
Jayantha is a figurative artist, passionate about capturing expressions on faces, whether it is cherubic child, a woman intently adjusting her earrings, or a peasant girl coyly looking out from a scarf.
Figurative art, while ‘everyone goes for landscape and scenery’, is very hard, he says and a figurative artist can turn his hand to anything. “Picasso himself was once upon a time a figurative artist.”
Jayantha’s latest exhibition, Expressions-17, will take place at the Lionel Wendt gallery on November 30 and December 1. Having exhibited from 2003, the 17th in his successful Expressions series focuses on the fresh innocence of children’s faces.
Born on the historic Buddha Jayanti day, he was so named at the request of a Buddhist monk (though he has always been a devout Roman Catholic, drawing at times Biblical scenes). The monk predicted that the infant would grow up to be an artist.
Jayantha Silva
Jayantha has also exhibited twice in Australia, and has been known to occasionally deviate from human figures and faces, like the time he was commissioned to do a gargantuan painting of a tea estate, for the Tea Board, now hanging as the Airport and Aviation Authority office’s reception or scenes from colonial Colombo with rickshaws and tree-lined avenues.
He has faced what many would see as a major setback, but in a calm stoic voice, he explains that, due to Glaucoma, he has only three quarters of sight in one eye and a quarter in the other eye. Strangely this has been for him a strength as an artist; it has given him a determination that is his greatest ally and he says things would ‘go haywire’ if he was to regain complete sight.
He has to listen to music if he is to draw at all. “I also ‘eyeball’ a lot… When I go on the road and see people, probably I observe more than you do”…
‘Expressions-17 will be at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery on November 30 and December 1 from 9.30 a.m.
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