Continuing his journey inspired by the yakada yaka
There’s movement on the canvases, and colour. For a change, the Paradise Road Gallery Café has lots of cheery hues from neon green to cherry, and the very broad brush strokes curve and cross, signifying the movements of a train – just like in those night-time photos where the movement of vehicles is caught like a golden blurred stroke…
Titled Railway Tracks, this is artist Pathum Gamage’s fourth exhibition at Paradise Road but he is enthusiastic and modest. Nothing changed since several years back this village lad from Elpitiya took the yakada yakka to come to Colombo with the vague dream of being an ‘artist’.
And that yakada yakka has been his main inspiration, subject and motif.
In this, the latest exhibition, the brush strokes are very very broad, and it’s fascinating to see how Pathum’s art has evolved. From the figurative, his art has become more and more abstract and simple.
He says he draws how, in the railway station, humanity en masse comes together in harmony, but once the train arrives that harmony is disrupted and people become selfish and ‘lose their humanity’.
Pathum Gamage
He also paints how the railway station absorbs the energy of these ‘jostling crowds’ of commuters. “The railway station has its own life- those pillars, those benches…”
Another reading of his work is that the train carries away people’s hopes, “and to fill that void a new train arrives and new commuters file in- it’s a drama that happens throughout the 24 hours”.
The new exhibition, says Pathum, draws a lot of inspiration from Ezra Pound’s haiku-like poem In a Station of the Metro which touched him with its imagist ‘painting’. The 14-word poem goes:
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
Pathum thanks Udayshanth Fernando of Paradise Road for instigating and supporting his journey as an artist.
Railway Tracks is open for viewing till November 13 from 10 a.m. till midnight at the Paradise Road Gallery Café, Colombo 3.
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