From his home in Kandy comes an artistic canvas of exactitude
View(s):Dennis Candy, down in Colombo from his home in the hills of Kandy, looks much younger than his fourscore years. Dressed in a pink shirt, the soft-spoken British artist exudes the contentment of a seeker who has finally found his Holy Grail, even if late in life…
Udayshanth Fernando, founder of the Paradise Road Galleries says he was introduced to Dennis through a friend and made a trip to Kandy where he was charmed by art never before exhibited. At first, Dennis was reluctant to go public with his sometimes flamboyant work, but agreed when Shanth suggested all proceeds go to the Rebuilding Sri Lanka Fund for the cyclone-affected.
Dennis Candy: Artist at work
At the Water’s Edge
Though enamoured by art since the youngest age, Dennis seemed to have got disillusioned due to his early brushes with commercial art (which was favoured over ‘fine art’ just then academically) in school as a teenager.
“I couldn’t draw what I wanted to, so I stopped drawing when I was 17 or 18,” he says. But the visual element would not desert his soul. Invariably with his camera, he kept clicking, even while he would go through his working life as a successful personnel manager after obtaining an MA in industrial psychology.
Dennis was pretty much the vessel afloat listless, and it was only after early retirement at 50 that he would dip into his innermost recesses of his mind and glean some glint of ‘meaning’.
It all began when he came on a holiday to the land that is his home today. What was meant to be a beach vacation included a trip to the ancient cities, and Dennis’s most momentous epiphany came at the Gal Vihara at Polonnaruwa, where the immense stone Buddhas gaze eternally on the jungle.
“I had a spiritual experience there. There were no other buildings there then… it was a peaceful place.”
Dennis had had some practice in meditation in England, so soon after that revelation in the medieval citadel, he found himself in the Nilambe Meditation Centre in Kandy. Five years later, when he would resolve to make Lanka his permanent home, the initial years would also be at Nilambe.
After that, his first instinct, set loose in Kandy in the last fin de siècle, was to dig up his camera and start preserving for posterity our upcountry handicrafts. “Kandy is like a communal organisation of craftsmen and women –I wanted to photograph those traditions before they died out.”
Five years were spent trekking off the beaten track to meet wood carvers, jewellery makers, potters and even the artisans who make costumes for the perahera – “the ves dancers’ costumes and caparisons for elephants.”
He went on to establish a website with 3,500 of his Sri Lankan photos. “It’s now the most popular Sri Lankan website, with 15 million views,” he says.
It was 15 years ago, when constant mobility to snap pictures was a problem, that he began drawing again. His work has a great resemblance to Lionel Wendt and he is delighted, after excusing himself to go to the gents’, to find that Shanth has a Wendt framed there above an Italian commode –a coppery nude!
Entirely self-taught, Dennis harks back to his youth in South London where he would go to galleries like the Tate, the National Gallery and the British Museum (quipping “stolen art (at the last mentioned place)- though as a teenager one didn’t know much about that!”).
He lists as inspiration artists from Michelangelo to Manjusri passing through Vermeer and van Dyke. While imbibing the key elements of western art –figure drawings, portraits and landscapes, his technique is vastly different. He first takes a photo of his object and works on it through Photoshop, and then turns to paper to do his deft finger-work using carbon pencils, brushes, and even cotton buds and toilet tissue among other tools.
It’s a meticulous process, whence the title of the exhibition at Paradise Road – Exactitude… “I take great care, and it takes hours and hours,” he says.
Candy is quite happy in the hill capital. His eyrie is at the edge of the Hantane range and he loves the city with its palpable aura of history. often living history, though the traffic and pollution, he says, sometimes does invade…
Exactitude will be on at the Paradise Road Gallery Café from January 8 till February 5; gallery hours- 10 a.m. till midnight.
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