Exhibition Opening Video

This video was filmed by Thisath Thoradeniya.

Art of Sybil Wettasinghe - book published by Theertha

Art of Sybil Wettasinghe, the book is published by Theertha in conjunction with the exhibition. This book contains an excellent write-up by Anoli Perera on the art of Sybil and a biography by Nethra Samarawickrama.

Anoli Perera is an artist and the Secretary of the Theertha International Artists' Collective.

Nethra Samarawickrama conducted the research for this exhibition. Nethra is a B.A. degree holder in Politics and Writing, Ithaca College, New York State, USA.

Illustration from the story book Kudahora

This is an illustration from the book Kudahora.

Run Away Beard original illustration

The original of this illustration is exhibited in this exhibition. This is from the book Run Away Beard (Duwana Rawula).

See all photos here.

Sybil lighting the traditional oil lamp to open the exhibition.

Pradeep Chandrasiri, Deputy Chairman of Theertha lighting the oil lamp.

Koralegedara Pushpakumara, lighting the oil lamp.

Sybil, Anoli Perera and Nethra Samarawickrama.

Photos - exhibition opening

Double click above photos to see in Picasa Web Albums.
This album has 50 images of the "Sybil: Art of Sybil Wettasinghe" exhibition opening. Please double click the slide show and go to PicasaWeb and add comments to the photos. I did my best with the captions.

Kudahora - Drawings from 1956, pioneering in detailed, textured drawings in Sri Lankan art!

Line Drawing for Kudahora 1. This drawing is done in 1956.

Line Drawing for Kudahora 2. This drawing is done in 1956.

These two paintings at the exhibition grabbed the attention of artist and archeologist Prof. Jagath Weerasingha and renowned artist and architect Tilak Samarawickrema.

Jagath observes the innumerable number of small lines hatched and drawn to give very interesting textures and shades of gray. The way the Kudahora 1st drawing is composed, with a bit of the old man's head coming out of the top dark margin, is compositionally very interesting. The rendering of the background trees, walls and the floor is technically fascinating. Jagath comments.

Tilak Samarawickrema believes that the detailed rendering especially in the Kudahora 2nd drawing at a very early time as 1950's, is pioneering and very interesting. (He's bringing out a publication called Ink of Lanka on his line-drawings from the 70's and 80's).

I personally think that these drawings, done with a crow quill dip pen, are in a taste and style captivating the contemporary artists. In the contemporary arena of top class drawings, one could place these drawings with a lost sense of the time they were produced, the 1950s.

Sybil's official website

Sybil's official website is www.sybilwettasinghe.com.

Art of Sybil Wettasinghe - By Anoli Perera, Chief Curator

(Source: Art of Sybil Wettasinghe book published for the exhibion.)

Sybil Wettasinghe is remembered by most of us as the author and illustrator of ‘Kuda Hora’, a legendary Sri Lankan children’s story which has been read and cherished by many generations of kids. A pioneer in the field of juvenile story writing and illustrating in Sri Lanka, Wettasinghe’s stories for children and her delightful rendering of images innovatively brought into life the essence of the tales narrated.

Introducing her own particular style as a book illustration artist as well as a prolific storyteller, her work set off a new genre of story books for children that had a rootedness in a particular indigenous idiom. It unselfconsciously unfolded the local village aspirations and the simplicity of life that is romantically linked to it. Referring to the practice of writing, Roland Barthes has noted that “…imagery, delivery, vocabulary spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the very reflexes of his art. Thus under the name of style a self sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology…”[i] Such speculations invite us to ponder on aspects of Wettasinghe’s life to grasp certain nuances and quintessence that is embedded in her work. Wettasinghe grew up in the cozy village environment of Gintota, a small town in the South near the port town of Galle, with its happy childhood memories, and her work provided an extensive canvas for her to recapture the nostalgic reminiscences of its blissful moments. Nethra Samarawickrama in her biographical note on Wettasinghe writes: “Her autobiography "Child in Me" provides a richly detailed account of the characters she came across, ranging from stilt walkers who visited the village and recited nadagam melodies and tom-tom beaters who carried the announcements of the temple to kavikolakarayas who conveyed news to the village through their long drawn poetic recitations.” [ii] In the 1920s Gintota still had the feel of the rural, and largely operated within a traditional value system and a way of life. Throughout her work Wettasinghe tries to capture this aspect of rural life, the nature of interactions and relationships within the community and their close proximity to nature.

When reading her work, we are literally and metaphysically nudged to fall in love with her village, its stereotypical characters, their idiosyncratic behavior and the witty and colorful dialogs that project a harmless, laidback world within which one feels so content to be in. Juxtaposed against the historical legacy of Euro- American juvenile stories based on sources such as legendary Grimms’ Fairy Tales, stories of Hans Christian Andersen and others spun by many foreign authors that were dominating the Sri Lankan child’s imaginary world for a long time, Wettasinghe’s world of characters with its localized experiences and episodes certainly provided the juvenile story writing in Sri Lanka a de-centering possibility from the European storytelling traditions and their nuances. If Eurocentric storytelling through stories such as ‘Snow White, Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty’ brought to life the narratives of white princesses, fire eating dragons, dark wicked stepmothers and European castles stimulated an alien fantasy in the Sri Lankan context, Wettasinghe’s Kuda Hora , Vesak Lantern and the Duvana Revula familiarized the urban child with the most joyous possibilities of village life playfully enriched with references to local customs, elements of cultural imagery and the splendor of its natural environment. As much as Wettasinghe’s work tantalized the child’s imaginary world, it also provided children’s story book writing a new link to a folk storytelling tradition rooted in the Sri Lankan context. While she was sympathetic and nostalgic toward the village that inspired her to romanticize it, she was unhesitant in wittily critiquing the urban life through her works such as ‘Kusumalatha’. This particular orientation also posited the village as pure and urban as contaminated with its familiarity with colonial and western ways of life. This became a popular genre for many creative works of literary writers, film makers and artists during the 1950s and 1960s. The pre and post independent anxieties of finding an ‘authentic self’ within the nation building project revived the interest in the traditional and the indigenous during the decades following 1948. In this socio-political environment Wettasinghe’s work which, largely privileged folk culture, found an ideologically compatriotic audiences and endorsers from the Southern Sinhala art and literary figures such as Martin Wickramasinghe, Chandraratne Manawasinghe, W.A Silva and Sunil Shantha.

A forerunner of illustration artists in Sri Lanka, Wettasinghe turned women’s creative energy into establishing an independent artistic profession that did not have a legacy that was locally rooted. Storytelling was mostly a woman’s task within her domesticity of child rearing where lullabies’ and numerous stories were recounted to kids by female members of the families. While some of these were commonly narrated tales from folk tales or fairytale that were circulated in society, others are made up or reinvented with variations to keep the attention of the young. It is through these acts of storytelling that children first became familiar with the social behavior systems, customs, norms and basics of morality. This also perhaps constitutes the threshold where they first encountered the world of art and literature where they develop their sense of aesthetic preferences and art of imagining. Storytelling is therefore a crucial activity in the socialization and early learning process of children. This creative act has been overlooked and taken for granted by many as part of domestic and maternal responsibilities of women. However, if one looks at where women’s creativity has been invested throughout the generations, it is now recognized that they have been directed towards various aspects of home decorations, needle work, and creative culinary inventions. Growing up amidst a strong-willed matriarchal environment where women in her own family were highly industrious and proficient in decorative arts such as lace-making, rush weaving and needle work , early on Wettasinghe was exposed to the value, strength and the potential of women’s creative activities of leisure: “she attributes the independence of spirit she developed in her adulthood to the values she learned from these strong-willed and opinionated women who had acquired a resourcefulness and self-sufficiency without the aid of the males who frequently left for the metropolis of Colombo in search of employment”. [iii] At Holy Family Convent in Colombo, a school with a cosmopolitan student population, Wettasinghe received a missionary education that provided her with a training in ‘domestic sciences’ that was assumed essential to be an accomplished wife. Nevertheless, Wettasinghe opted to pursue a career as an artist over her mother’s wish that she should become an architect. The early impressions of the multiple and creative roles women in her family played perhaps made significant impressions within Wettasinghe which later manifested in her bold move to be an independent artist. Wettasinghe’s work and her achievements in the field of juvenile story writing allow us to assume that she has directed this creative domain available to women out of the domestic sphere and located it in the public domain, challenging the established art of storytelling that prevailed at the time. In this she has not only introduced a particular aesthetic and illustration style but also a linguistic and ideological shift within the field of juvenile story writing in Sri Lanka.

Her work makes us think beyond the established notions of visual arts which tend not to include the practice of book illustration as an endeavor of high art and leaves it rather in the larger category of design and commercial art. Wettasinghe’s work, with her grasp of the formal aspect of painting, innovativeness in the compositions and their narrative power allow us to rethink the boundaries of art-making within the visual arts and to relook at book illustration art as a credible art making practice that demands the same endorsement procedures and acknowledgement systems as in other visual arts practices that are comfortably positioned as high art.

A prolific artist, Wettasinghe has an extensive body of work (nearly 200 illustrated books) to her credit mostly written in Sinhala language (later translated to many other languages). Her initial audiences largely came from the Sinhala speaking communities, and the romantic sense of nationalism that her books unpretentiously inculcated in the readers was consumed within the consciousness of national pride and ideas of national authenticity.

This exhibition ‘Sybil: Art of Sybil Wettasinghe’ tries to capture a cross section of her work undertaken during her career as an illustrator spanning over 50 years. It is also a tribute to a remarkable woman artist and a storyteller who chose to evolve her art beyond the accepted norms and boundaries of her trade, and for persistently retaining her freedom to pursue her convictions in life.

Anoli Perera

July 2009

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[i] Roland Barthes, 1977, Writing Degree Zero, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill and Wang.

[ii] Nethra Samarawickrama, 2009, Unpublished archival notes on Sybil Wettasinghe, Women’s Art Program, Theertha Archive.

[iii] Nethra Samarawickrama, 2009, Unpublished archival notes on Sybil Wettasinghe, Women’s Art Program, Theertha Archive.

About Sybils Exhibition - by Nethra Samarawickrama

Nethra Samarawickrama is a B.A. degree holder in Politics and Writing, Ithaca College, New York State, USA. Nethra conducted the research for this exhibition.

“Sybil: Art of Sybil Wettasinghe,” an exhibition at Theerta Red Dot Gallery is a retrospective voyage for the art lovers, on the work of artist, author and illustrator, Sybil Wettasinghe. Over her 60-year long career, Wettasinghe’s artistic output has encapsulated a variety of mediums ranging from book illustrations and children’s novels to newspaper sketches and batik prints. Wettasinghe undertook her first major artistic assignment at the age of 15 when she illustrated the Nava Maga Standard 5 Reader, the first book to be printed in colour in Sri Lanka. In 1948, after completing her SSC examinations, Wettasinghe joined the Lankadeepa as a graphic artist and proceeded to illustrate stories for the Times, Silumina, Sarasaviya, Daily News and Janatha newspapers. In 1952, she made her first attempt at storytelling through her juvenile novel ‘Kuda Hora,’ which gained popularity overnight. Since then, this book has captivated the imagination of several generations of Lankan children and acquired a wide international readership upon being translated into seven languages. A prolific writer as well as an illustrator, Wettasinghe has produced over 200 books over the course of her career.

Wettasighe's newspaper illustrations and children's books are characterized primarily by their idealization of rural Sri Lanka. Mired in folk culture, her stories frequently invoke the imagery, festivities and rituals that form an integral part of village life. However, Wettasinghe’s work does not overlook the culture and lifestyles of the urban elite. On the contrary, much of her art explores the terrain between urban/rural polarities. In doing so, she often romanticizes the rural and caricatures the urban. If her books Kuda Hora, Vesak Kuduwa and Magul Gedara Bath Natho sensitively captures the intimacy of village life, its everyday rhythms, traditions and archetypal characters, her adult novels Kusumalatha and Rasawathi provides a satirical critique of the foibles, habits and social graces of Colombo’s ‘high-society’ women. This tension between folk and elite culture, village and city dwelling is one that Wettasinghe has had to confront in her own life. Until the age of six, she lived in Gintota, a village close to Galle town, and later moved to Colombo to pursue an English education. Alienated in the unfamiliar environs of the city, Wettasinghe turned to her art as a way of keeping alive her memories of Gintota. As she approached adulthood, her practice of drawing evolved into a serious art form, which continued to give her an outlet to revisit and re-create the world of her childhood.

Wettasinghe came of age as an artist at a time when there was a profusion of activity in the Sri Lanka’s artistic spheres and local playwrights, novelists, poets and musicians were striving to imagine, express and re-create a Sinhala identity purified of colonial influences. Wettasinghe believes that her portrayal of folk culture was not driven by a particular ideological purpose and was more of an expression of her desire to remember and describe the village she left behind. However, perhaps inadvertently, Wettasinghe’s artistic negotiation of her nostalgia for Gintota intersected in significant ways with this Sinhala cultural revival. At the time, children’s literature in Sinhala was dominated by the trend to translate Euro-American stories such as Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm’s Brothers. Through her books Kuda Hora, Magul Gedera Bath Natho, Sinnakku Mama and Duwana Revula, Wettasinghe worked to refashion juvenile literature to suit a local readership. By focusing her writings and illustrations on Lankan folklore, Wettasinghe offered children narratives embedded in familiar landscapes with characters and events they could relate to. Besides recalibrating the nature of children’s literature in Sinhala, Wettasinghe also made a substantial intervention in shifting the status quo of graphic art. Through her craftsmanship, originality and unique visual language Wettasinghe posed a challenge to the established boundaries between art practices considered as ‘high art’ and storybook and newspaper illustrations often relegated to the lesser-acknowledged realm of commercial art.

On the 25th of July, 2009, Theertha Red Dot Gallery ed the exhibition “Sybil: Art of Sybil Wettasinghe,” which will be open to the public until August 12th 2009. This exhibition will feature selected works from Wettasinghe’s original line drawings, newspaper illustrations and books including Kuda Hora, Runaway Beard, Andare`, Mahadenamutta, Podda Saha Poddi, Rasawathi and Hoity the Fox. As part of this venture to honor the life work of this distinctive artist, Theertha will also produce a catalog containing a biographic sketch and a pictorial overview of Wettasinghe’s art.

Sponsors of The "Sybil: Art of Sybil Wettasinghe" exhibtion and the book

Sybil: Art of Sybil Wettasinhe the exhibition and the book published along with the exhibition is sponsored by the following organizations:

The Arts Colaboratory

Arts Collaboratory is a programme for the support of visual artist-run initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and for exchange between these and visual arts organisations in the Netherlands. It provides financial support, facilitates knowledge sharing, and promotes networking and artistic exchange.
Arts Collaboratory was established in January 2007 by Hivos and the DOEN Foundation, and is carried out in cooperation with the Mondriaan Foundation.

DOEN Foundation,

DOEN Foundation works towards the achievement of a liveable world in which everyone has a place. Acting within its four fields of operation of Sustainable Development, Culture, Welfare and Social Cohesion, it provides subsidies where necessary, and arranges loans and equity investments where possible.DOEN Foundation achieves its objective through the revenues it receives from the Dutch Postcode Lottery, the Sponsor Bingo Lottery and the BankGiro Lottery.

The Mondriaan Foundation

The Mondriaan Foundation encourages the appreciation of visual arts, design and the cultural heritage from the Netherlands. Last year, the Mondriaan Foundation supported 877 projects with a total of € 23 million. 319 international projects in 46 different countries were supported financially with a total amount of € 2.899.000.

Hivos

A fair, free and sustainable world – that is what Hivos, the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation, wants to contribute to. Together with local organisations in developing countries, Hivos strives for a world in which all citizens – both men and women – have equal access to resources and opportunities for development.
Together with many partner organisations, Hivos contributes to a world with equal opportunities for people to develop their talents. Hivos attempts to realise this by offering financial support and by advising, networking, advocacy, providing education and exchanging knowledge.

This exhibition is presented by Theertha International Artists' Collective, Sri Lanka.

Sybil Wettasinghe Exhibition - Dates, Times, Venu, etc.

theertha International Artists Collective presents

"Sybil: Art of Sybil Wettasinghe"

Preview of the exhibition is on 25th July 2009 at 6.30 PM
at theertha Red Dot Gallery
36 A, Baddegana Road South, Pitakotte.

The exhibition will remain open from 26th July to 12th August 2009.

Gallery hours: Monday to Wednesday 10.30 AM - 5.00 PM.
Sundays 11.00 AM - 4.30 PM.
Closed on all public and mercantile holidays.

Exhibition curation team:
Anoli Perera, Pradeep Chandrasiri, Bandu Manamperi.
Research on the work and life of Sybil Wettasinghe conducted by
Nethra Samarawickrama.

theertha International Artists Collective,
36 A, Baddegana Road South Pitakotte, Sri Lanka.
Tele: 011 286 5900
Email: theerthaiac@yahoo.com
Website: www.theertha.org