Senaka Senanayake

Senaka Senanayake’s talent was nurtured at The Royal College, Colombo. His first major work was twenty feet long, the length of his primary school classroom. Senanayake painted each day for years. When he was eight years old, journalist and art critic L.P. Goonatilleke persuaded the Ceylon Society of Arts to organise a solo exhibition at the National Gallery. Many of his early works were exhibited in San Diego when he was only ten years old. These were some of the first of more than 100 solo exhibitions that Senanayake would have to date. Not long after, Senanayake painted before Dr. Emil Van Konigenenberg, the former vice president of KLM, who was so impressed that he agreed to sponsor the young artist with the best art materials from Holland. This partnership lasted for many successful years, a time when Senanayake honed his skills and matured as an artist.

The present work derives from a transformative period in Senanayake’s life when he moved to New Haven, Connecticut for a degree in art and architecture at Yale University. Painted at the age of 17, Compassion marks a culmination of nearly two decades of disciplined practice and observations. While this early work maintains the same sense of wonder that Senanayake cultivated throughout his childhood, it reveals a maturing artist interested in portraying emotion. Compassion features a central angelic, motherly figure, her left hand fashioned in rudra mudra which is believed to have powerful healing and energizing properties. She cares for a younger male figure who lies across the foreground of the painting. He looks up at her, and she looks calmly across him, invoking a feeling of peace. As figures and faces and birds blend together in careful, hatching paint strokes, several dark purple dharmachakras – the wheel of the law of dharma – remind the viewer, and the artist, of the cyclical nature of life and the meditative concentration and mindfulness the Buddha taught.

Senanayake’s work has been exhibited in over 18 countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Czechoslovakia, Korea and Egypt and he was commissioned by the White House and the United Nations headquarters in New York. For the past several decades, Senanayake has been devoted to depicting the natural world to promote public awareness of environmental degradation in his native Sri Lanka.