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| Wednesday, 17 November 2004 |
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Sanjiv Mendis He dressed his world in a coat of many colours by Carl Muller If an artist is born, not made, are the violent days that heralded his birth the first bugle notes of overwhelming talent? It was in the curfew hours of July 18, 1971, that Sanjiv Mendis prepared himself to come into a world of roaring Army patrols, high-speed chases, the chatter of guns, the pounding feet of insurgents. What passion ignited his infant mind when he first saw the starched hospital ward in the early hours of July 19? Who can tell - and yet, as his mother, Charmaine, says: he found within him a craze for cars, the "mashing-down" of vehicles in road mishaps; the aircraft that sliced the sky; for guns.
It has been said, even with some hesitation, that infants react to the world around them. Sanjiv's home held a flaring artistic environment. Even as a toddler, he wanted to express the things that rose within him, kneeling on a pillow, crouched over in his mother's bed, constructing his own sense-world. Such a foetal position. Such a return to the tender, unworldly womb. Charmaine Mendis, the mother who loved him to distraction, could only wonder at this child she bore. Her book - a throbbing heart of a book - presents the drawings and paintings of Sanjiv, from those first impressions of tiny fingers clutching pencil, pastels and crayons, raising giddy impressions that flowed unendingly from his mind, to the young man of twenty, painting, creating with a disdain for advice or suggestion, indifferent to how others viewed his work, making of himself something so individual, so unique, that he was, naturally, prone to rebel, be strong-willed, hearing only the voice of his soul and doing what it dictated. Loving child Was he opinionated? One could suppose so. In her book, Charmaine gives us such a heart-felt preface. "My son Sanjiv," she says - and she came to accept that he was so special, moving to a rhythm that possessed him, dressing his world in coats of many colours - a loving child who also loved the lonely existence of communion with himself and his art. Let me quote: "Looking back, although I did not realize it at the time, Sanjiv had to have the soul of an artist in the way he responded to beauty. We shared many a beautiful cameo of Nature: the shape of a tree, petals of a flower, the superb juxtaposition of colour in a bird, cloud pictures, and, of course, Sri Lanka's glorious sunsets."
But earlier, Charmaine gives us another side of this boy-bundle who was so decidedly "his own man" from his childhood: Up to the time he died, he was not particularly interested in books on art and artists although he used to read much. His taste in reading matter ranged from "Tin Tin" and "Asterix" to Jane's "All the World's Aircraft". As a teenager, his knowledge of weapons and aircraft was specialized. It was an abiding interest and he was constantly updating himself on the subject of war...." To look at his many sketches, pastels and paintings from 2 1/2 years to 19, is to see a rare forcefulness of line colour, Even his 2 1/2 to 4-year sketches grip. They seem to have swarmed out of a mind that declares with resonance: "This is me - and Me I will be" Incredible talents Charmaine's book is titled "Beyond Life" and beyond life does Sanjiv now live, forever bonded with the mother whose own incredible talents met his in liquid symphony. In the book, a friend, Jeetendra H.M. Marcelling says: "Let (Sanjiv) take you on a journey through his world splashed with a myriad colours, tinged with mystery and showing his purity of heart...visualize the world as he saw it and gauge the depth of his feelings...(understand) him as he wishes to be understood and...keep his memory alive." When one sees the fantastic visions Sanjiv saw, one thinks of a concertina, drawn-out, folding, stretching all of nineteen years, capturing sight and sound, making a boom-box of life and making his own feeling a canvas without end. Sensitivity shows - a stubborn sort of sensitivity, because as he grew he had to also counter and question "the frailties, inequities and irrationalities" of the world-swirl around him. One sees the bubbling enthusiasm of his "elephant" (acrylic on board) when he was four years old. His "Waterfall 1" at five holds an aurora-like dram that packs the board with wreaths and wedges, the composition sublime. "Waterfall 2" carries an abstract sort of definition that sweeps the white spume through tangles of bold colour. It is this boldness that characterizes - the representation that magnetizes. Sanjiv held his first exhibition at the Lionel Wendt when he was five. Aptly called "Small is Beautiful", he presented to a startled and widly-admiring public, 64 paintings in powder and acrylics. His second exhibition at six - "Small is Yet Beautiful" was a riotous oil on canvas medley - no, melody. "Paddy Fields" was so spirited: the brushwork so finely executed that it held a veiled scraperboard effect against a sea of green, a background of living blue. Quality was never enforced. It leaped out of the canvas unbidden. Artistic depth "Lion at sunrise" (acrylic on canvas) held the power to stun, "Airport" the power to rocket into the mind. He also had this inborn power to bemuse as the details of his every interpretation were drawn out of his mind to fill the spaces of his canvas. At six, his oil on canvas, "Kandy" became the proud possession of Dr. O. Grande of Norway. It was a lyric in oils and suddenly one sees a walled city gold gleam, a stark red plateau, melting orange under the gold, washing away into a distant rose and white. Or is the "city" the steel-protected Maligawa and the black-green surround the forest approach? He rarely explained his creations because that scarcely mattered, did it? By the time he was 13, he had mounted ten major exhibitions - five in Sri Lanka, the others in Belgium, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Singapore and the US. He was eight when "Motor Race" (oil on canvas) revealed true artistic depth and plane. "War", "Buildings at Night", "Skyscrapers on Fire", "Star Wars 1" revealed the boy maturing beyond his ears. Each of these are gems of incandescence. His third and fourth exhibitions at six were also titled "Small is beautiful". They were followed by "Sanjiv at Eight" and yet another "Small is Beautiful" when he was nine. His first international exhibition was in the USA - when he was eleven: "Sanjiv at Meridian House". Followed by "Sanjiv in Brussels" in Belgium. At twelve, "Sanjiv in the Hague" took him to Holland, then to Singapore and the Philippines. His major showing at the Lionel Wendt, "Sanjiv 83" was held at the Lionel Wendt when he was 13. In 1992, "Beyond Life" celebrated his "crowded hour of glorious life" at the National Art Gallery. Everywhere Sanjiv went, his art went. In every shining corner of his soul, art pulsed rhythms that plucked wind-strings. Laster James Peries told of his stunning colour-sense, the visionary world he created. Stunning colour sense "La Libre Belgique" called him the little Mozart of Sri Lanka; The "Times Journal" of Manila said: " He can blend colours as in a Matisse masterpiece or a Chagall stained glass... the colours that explode on his canvas and the forms that take shape are his God-given own." Sir Arthur C. Clarke, on taking in Sanjiv's first exhibition said: "Look out, Senaka!". Charmaine's book, also titled "Beyond Life' holds a collection of Sanjiv's work from 2 1/2 to 19. It also holds a beautiful elegy by Sanjiv de Silva, written in 1991. When I lost my own son, Charmaine wrote me, told me of the loss of Sanjiv, of the strange affinity of our losses. Both boys - each their own storms of creativity, stirring their own whirlwinds of life, colouring them the way they had to. Truly did Sanjiv dress his world in coats of many colours. Now he is painting Paradise in the way he wants it to be! **** Back **** |
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