At the exhibition I told you about earlier, I met one of the art teachers who, not surprisingly, is an artist himself. Mr. Chandana Samarakoon. I did not have the opportunity to see his work live since he resides in Kandy and we met in Colombo (I will tell you about another trip I made to Kandy in another post). However, he has a website. Check it out here

He told me that he work in different techniques and with various subjects. One topic that is of great interest for him right now is all the precious, wonderful paintings that you find in the temples all over Sri Lanka. These paintings are on its way to be destroyed due to humidity and not being taken care of. It is such a pity that these treasures might disappear. He has therefore taken up reproducing these paintings onto canvases.

I truly admire his intention, but one idea, right off bat, would be to ”modernize” these paintings into contemporary art, as you see from the examples above Chandana is clearly a man with many art techniques. And I am not saying that the old paintings should not be preserved, I really think they do – but from an art lovers’ (design lovers’) point of view I think it would be exiting to see contemporary art being done with the inspiration from ancient art. And why not an art exhibition exhibiting both the “true to its original”-paintings side by side with the modernized version?

Yes, I admit; I love anything fusion. Fusion food, art, music, people…

So why not fuse together ancient with contemporary and make it… contempcient?

Here’s another work from Chandana that I really like:

Would you like to own one of Chandana’s art pieces? Contact me or Chandana directly.