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Artist-poet with an ethereal vision
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When you view, the overwhelming display of works presented by Champani Devika, you invariably enter a domain of creative lyrical paintings, that leaves you breathless by the surprising uniqueness of her vision.
It is very rarely indeed that you see in the average exhibition of paintings in Sri Lanka, the kind of steady and sustained aesthetic quality, Champani Devika has been able to achieve in her extensive range of creations.
Her riveting creative products are the outcome of a seamless synthesis between lyrical poetry and the art of the painter. The fusion between these two differing yet kindred currants of poetry and painting, is so complete in her works, that one cannot help but describe her works as visual poetry.
Her individual style is to provide lyrical lines as caption - material for her paintings. This way her art is directly inspired by her poetry.
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Whatever may be the thematic variation, all her works tend to exude a spiritual flavour. The message embodied in her paintings, appeals to the inner being of the viewers, and gets embedded in the inner recesses of the concerned spectators.
The figures in her works, seem to possess an upward urge as if drawn by an unseen divine magnet. In consequence, Champani Devika's compositions convey an elongation, implying, as it were a need to reach upwords.
To communicate a complex concept, operating at several levels, artist Champani Devika, utilizes a set of layered colours.
A case in point is the painting entitled, "Everything is there - not the happiness yet - There is little, the happiness is there."
The spiritual depth, one discerns in many a piece done by Champani Devika, seems the result of an inner evolution, that she may have inherited by birth.
When she transforms a spiritual thought into a telling visual form, she seems to draw upon experiences that have accumulated in her soul, over several births, as it were.
Her visual portraiture of the passage of a being, from death to birth in a new life, produces a telling effect in the mind of the viewer, by the intriguing imagery she has conjured up, to communicate an experience, a human being can rarely acquire.
Even where, Champani Devika is merely decorative in approach, the characteristic ethereal appeal is very much present.
Generally speaking, her palette is subdued, allowing a form of gentleness to pervade the painting.
For all we know, her paintings could have emerged bodily from a mellow, lyrical dream - whatever the subject - matter.
The environmental setting in which her childhood years passed, contributed substantially towards her inner tranquillity. The rural background in which she was raised as a child, nourished the incipient lyricism, stirring within her sensitive soul. The formal training in Fine Arts, enabled her to discover her own personal style of painting.
But, the impressive articulation of abstract thoughts in visual idioms that befitted the original notion, is, without any doubt whatsoever, is the outcome of her own unusual imagination.
In most of her works she takes abstract liberties with objects and persons, transforming them into shapes and colours, she prefers to endow them with.
But, the few nudes among her works, are a different proposition all together.
These nudes portray a linear virility and a proper sense of aesthetic proportion, without yielding any ground abstract manipulations with reality.
The total impression she projects through her variegated articulations in colour, is, that her work is just out of this world.
The message that comes through her works, loud and clear, is that Champani Devika's creative possibilities in painting are endless.
We wish her a fruitful future, in which all her creative wishes will be aesthetically fulfilled impaired by the sources, from which she seems to draw strength.
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