Druvinka (Druvinka Madawela)

A woman sits in a house in the Kulu Valley, high in the Indian Himalayas, laying wash after wash of grey, blue and ochre onto mounted paper until a figure rises out of the layers that she says she did not set out to paint. Druvinka (now Druvinka Puri) has described herself as an instrument of her art rather than its author, and to follow how a painter born in Sri Lanka came to work this way, in a village in Himachal Pradesh and by her own account as a practising ascetic, you have to begin with a family in which making pictures was simply what one did.

She was born in Sri Lanka in 1971, into a household of artists: her father, Mano Madawela, was a painter, and her brother Shehan followed the same path. At eighteen she left for India, and in 1990 she found her way to Kala Bhavana, the art school at Santiniketan that Rabindranath Tagore had founded in Bengal, where she took her training. India became less a place she visited than the ground of her practice, and she settled at length in the Himalayas, adopting the intuitive, meditative discipline she has pursued for more than two decades.

The method is inseparable from the belief. She builds her surfaces in tempera, floating pigment into rice paper laid over the canvas, layer upon translucent layer, and in later work mounting Nepali bamboo paper to divide the picture into small compartments she associates with karma. The palette stays close to earth and shadow, greys and blues and sepias and ochres, and out of it come serpent figures, cosmologies and the descent into Patalaloka, the world beneath, the imagery of Hindu and tantric tradition rendered without illustration. She treats the canvas as a threshold between the visible and what she holds to lie past it, and the paintings are offered less as statements than as records of that crossing.

Her exhibiting life reaches back to 1991, and she was among the first artists Barefoot Gallery in Colombo showed, returning there across the decades with solo exhibitions in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2025 and, in March 2026, the show she titled ‘Alakhshya: One that cannot be perceived’. Her work has travelled beyond Sri Lanka to India, London, Malaysia and New York, and in 2011 she was included in the Saskia Fernando Gallery survey ‘Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’, among the painters who carry the island’s art abroad.

She remains, in the end, the figure in the Himalayan house, the self set aside so that the work can arrive. The distance she put between herself and the world she was born into is the same distance her paintings ask a viewer to cross, from the seen surface of things toward the reality she believes waits underneath.