The Sai Baba and a cousin who is an environmentalist are responsible for Senaka Senanayake’s painterly journeys into a rapidly disappearing landscape.
Singapore-based Buggy Surtani has work in India, true — a L’Occitane store is opening in Khan Market, New Delhi, and his Kay Ess Enterprises is developing a fragrance and cosmetics range for Reebok — but the real reason he’s visiting right now is friend and artist Senaka Senanayake’s groundbreaking show on rainforests at about the same time that the people who hold our futures in their hands are heading for the climate change gabfest in Copenhagen.
The Surtanis, formerly of Sri Lanka, are among the largest collectors of Senanayake’s works — at least a hundred paintings by the artist’s reckoning — and have picked up four more oils at the exhibition, but they aren’t the only ones to have flown in from outside India for the show. Liquor industry magnate Ravimohan Tissanayagam is lending his support, as are others who have been his votaries for as long as they can remember.
Senanayake’s story is well known, at least to those in the art fraternity of the subcontinent. Considered a child prodigy, Senanayake’s talent was acknowledged and burnished as an adolescent, and he became the first Sri Lankan undergrad student at Yale University.
A conventional career, one his parents might have chosen for him, was sacrificed to the altar of art, and from most accounts Senanayake seems to have found the going easy, but it was his Catholic wife Jennifer’s chance meeting with the Sai Baba that seemed to have changed the course of his artistic career.
Senanayake himself is Buddhist with a curiosity about theology, but when the Sai Baba asked Jennifer to tell her husband he should not paint pictures of women that are degrading to them — a reference no doubt to the artist’s nudes — Senanayake found himself altering course. “My work changed,” says the artist whose enjoyment of the good life seems far-removed from his belief in the spiritual nature of life. “The Sai Baba says all happiness is sandwiched between sadnesses, and it is for that state of happiness that we all strive.”
It has been over a decade since Senanayake has been painting rainforests, not as a measure of his, or the world’s, state of happiness but more on account of “stopping negativity” and bringing about “a positive energy” to his work. If the Sai Baba showed him the way, it was a cousin in the environmental sector “who scared the hell out of me” by pointing out that “mankind’s survival was at stake” with the disappearing rainforests. And it was to attract the young, whose future is endangered, that Senanayake decided to embark on a journey that would make him an ambassador of rainforests around the world.
There is something fantastic, unreal even, but magical about his paintings. But are the colours real? Are these rainforests even real? Senanayake has probably been asked those questions so frequently, his answers sound almost like clichés: Yes, the colours are real; yes, he draws what he sees on his visits to rainforests in Sri Lanka and Malaysia; yes, they seem unreal, but that’s only because you and I haven’t been to a rainforest.
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His reactions might be intense, but he’s on tap with information: “Seventy per cent of rainforests in Sri Lanka have been destroyed, and now both government and NGOs are trying to persuade corporates in the private sector to buy back rainforest land and re-forest it.”
Did I know, he asks, that there are over 20 varieties of pitcher plants, 70 varieties of ginger, 60 varieties of heliconias in these rainforests? I confess my ignorance. And have I considered the variety of butterflies, or dragonflies, birds, insects, ferns, mushrooms, fish? Or the endemic species that hold the mysteries of life and healing? “There are artists who paint only for themselves, some who want to make only money, others who address issues of social responsibility.” No prizes for guessing where Senanayake sees himself.
Shafts of sunlight break through the dense foliage of his canvases, giant leaves and exuberant flowers bloom splendidly. “I draw directly on canvas with charcoal,” he explains his process of working, using layers upon layers of colours to get the hues and tints that are so delicate, it’s difficult to print them anywhere close to their original shades. And now, Senanayake stretches comfortably, “I’d love to paint reptiles,” he says, “they’re so beautiful.”
With collectors all the way from Germany and Korea to India and, of course, Sri Lanka, Senanayake seems committed to life as an ecologically- and environmentally-conscious painter, but if there’s one thing he regrets, it is that the Sai Baba has still not granted him darshan. “Jennifer has met him several times, he’s blessed my children, but...” he peters off ruefully, “I haven’t been as lucky.” Maybe it’s the Sai Baba’s way of testing him as he gives himself, instead, to the magical world of (disappearing) rainforests.