Erandathi Damunupola’s Urban Greens, which was open to the public, ended its debut exhibition yesterday. It was both a pleasing and calming experience to walk from one painting to another. The blend of colours and themes were soothing, even though at once, one is forced take a step back and look at a painting closely; for they silently request you to think a little beyond what is there. Two such paintings, in particular, made me deliberate on the unsaid; they were the cross section of a big root with a tearful eye in the middle of it and a little child opening a door to a world with nothing but walls, with the only greenery in his surroundings being a plant in a pot. Erandathi captures the harsh reality of the boundaries of the urban” going green” in her own simple artistic way that one would be compelled to visualize it even afterwards in the absence of the paintings. What I realized was that she is not slapping us across the face with the crude reality of the destruction of the greenery in the cities. She is not pleading us to look at it either. Instead, in her own gentle way, she quietly asks us to rethink and reflect and maybe readjust our ways and means?
Amid her attempts to portray the harshness of the city cultures and their practices, there are quite a number of paintings that attract you to their beautiful colour blends: she uses bright colours together in a very precise manner, so that the combination is always delightful to behold. Each artwork has so much precision and clarity that is specific to it.
I would not do justice to this small review if I were to forget the three little artists and their combo effort: Erandathi’s three little ones, Menuka, Thenuka and Chenuli all added beautiful paintings to the debut, making it a double debut.
Erandathi’s paintings, all in all, take you on a bumpy trajectory, but surprisingly, the journey is very soothing, pleasing and calming. This is something that is contradictory to our life in the city: rushed, in a hurry, amid all of its hustle and bustle. Her paintings are lush, bright and opulent, quite in contrast to what one would expect from her theme, ‘Urban Greens’. The title evokes the brown, rusty and dry, however, what I found was a little oasis on those big white walls of the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery; something that I could not, otherwise, find among the urban greens. Perhaps her intention was to make us realize that there is always a paradox that tantalizes us; even among the urban greens, brown is not always that brown, that we can have some hope?
Pictures by Ranjith Asanka
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