"With his keen eyes for details and artistic brush strokes, Lalith Senanayake brilliantly portrays the multi-faceted life in idyllic hill country village of Pussellawa. It is not only his remarkable style which immortalises the cultural landscape of Pussellawa with its lush-green tea plantations surrounded by misty hills, but also his sharp insight into the vivid life there."
Veteran artist Lalith Senanayake's exhibition of paintings titled "Pussellawa on Canvas" is now on at the American Centre, Colombo. Perhaps the most striking painting is the one titled "The Youth faded inside a tea leaf".
It is a picture of a maid carrying a basket of tea leaves. The lush tea plantations in Pussellawa provide livelihoods for a community whose entire lives are spent in and around the tea plantations. This young woman would have been born in a line-room and eventually would take up work at a tea plantation where her forefathers would have worked and lived their entire lives as labourers. Their lives would have been dried up under scorching sun and faded their youth faded away under the shade of tea leaves. It is the plight of the plantation workers for generations. This unknown young lady represents her generation. Lalith has artistically captured and portrayed vividly the grim story of a generation through a maid. He has used colours sparingly and aptly captured the facial expression of the maid. Tea plantations in Pussellawa not only occupy a prominent place in the economy, but also constitute a larger portion of its cultural landscape.
"Speaking Eyes" is a portrait of a girl intensely looking at some unknown object. Her silhouette is reflected upon a glass of a doorframe while part of her face is lit up by a beam of light filtered on to her face.
The attention of the artist is on her extraordinary perceptive eyes which tell a story in silence as if they speak. Apart from the part of the face which is lit up by a beam of light, the rest of the painting seems dark and by manipulation of light and shade, Lalith has focused the attention of the viewers on the perceptive eyes of the girl which is the theme of the painting. From the flowers tucked onto her hair and the "Pottu" (black dot) on her forehead and ear-rings suggest the girl's ethnicity.
by Indeewara Thilakarathne
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