The painters of the pavement
Capt Elmo Jayawardane
On one side of the Viharamaha Devi Park is the Colombo Town Hall. The
other side is a tree shaded wide road where one could see local artists
selling paintings. Horton Place is what the street is called, named
after a colonial giant of yester-year.
The gift of drawing here is abundant, among these unknown and unsung
painters of the pavement. The place is more like a scaled-down local
Montmartre, where the Sri Lankan versions of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec are represented by a self-taught Wanathamulle
Gamini or an inglorious Palawatte Dilshan and the likes of their clan.
They are mostly nameless artists making a living with their cheap
brushes and cheaper water colours.
 Yet the final products are excellent, though created using mediocre
equipment they team with absolute raw creative artistry. You name it,
they have it and if they do not have it, they will create it for you and
paint your choice that can be collected in a few days.
The place is vibrant, colourful and simply splendid. People come here
to browse and enjoy the artwork, maybe to bargain and buy paintings that
clearly hide virgin talent. The locally created master-pieces exchange
hands for a few thousand rupees, that is if the seller is lucky. Most
get sold way below their worth, barely helping to keep the home fires
burning of a desperate artist carving out a living from his unheralded
brilliance.
That part is sad, as in most aspects of ‘street maestros,’ nothing
new, the world has aged seeing such un-blossomed abilities, the
unfathomable sorrow of ‘pauper genius’ irrespective of under which sky
they roamed, painted or sang.
A lot of these masterpieces are bought by the Lankans living abroad
who are doing their annual pilgrimage to the mother land. The Vihara
Maha Devi Park road-side art gallery has become a ‘must-visit’ for art
lovers, especially the visiting locals who carry the paint-splashed
canvases across oceans to decorate walls in their homes in far away
countries where they are domiciled.
In gilded frames these paintings adorn the lounge-room walls,
artistic beauty intermixed with nostalgic memories.
Here they become representations of Sri Lanka, the owners showing-off
to their friends who admire in awe. Such is the resting place of the
final product, maybe created in a shanty home with a leaking roof, with
mediocre paint and wasted brushes on cheap canvas. That would probably
be the lot of most Horton Place artists, struggling to survive in a
world that pays scant regard to the excellence created by master
artists.
Theirs is an art gallery in the shade of giant ‘maara’ trees popping
out of the Vihara Maha Devi Park.
The paintings here are absolutely captivating; some fit enough to be
displayed in the best of arcades anywhere in the world.
May be the years would be kind to the likes of Gamini and Dilshan and
their clan. Maybe they too would get some long over-due recognition for
their dexterity which certainly qualifies for admiration. But such
changes take time or may never even happen.
Today’s artists of Horton Place may fade with the years and would be
replaced by the newer ones with similar abilities pleading to be noticed
as their predecessors did.
Their predicament would be the same as the ones before, no different
to Gamini and Dilshan, street-side painters with dented hopes and
unrealized ambitions, talent simply buried under the shaded pavements of
Horton Place.
This is a chapter from the book “Yana Maga” by Elmo Jaywardena which
will be launched on January 9.
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