Jayasiri Semage

Readers of Lankadeepa saw his line every day without always knowing the name, and gallery-goers saw the same hand at a far larger scale, in historical scenes that filled whole walls. Jayasiri Semage worked both as a newspaper illustrator and as a painter of national and religious narrative, in an idiom drawn from the classical and the traditional rather than the modern.

He was born in 1941 at Ambalangoda, the southern town long known for its mask carving and its craft traditions. He served as chief artist of the newspaper Lankadeepa, and painted historical and narrative subjects on a large scale. He was honoured with the title of Kalasuri.

He worked squarely in the decades after the ’43 Group, but held to a traditional, historical-narrative idiom rather than the modernism of many of his contemporaries.

The style itself looked back to the island’s beginnings. Semage built his manner on the wall paintings of Sigiriya and of Ajanta, and drew from them above all the female figure, praised in his own country as unsurpassed in the rendering of feminine grace in line and colour. His subjects were the life of the Buddha, the Jataka stories and the deeds of the Sinhala kings, set down with a draughtsman’s clarity of contour and a warm, even colour, and worked at any scale the commission asked, from a newspaper cut no wider than a hand to painted narratives running past forty feet. His was the revivalist’s road rather than the modernist’s, the old fresco line carried, by a working newspaper artist’s discipline, into the galleries and temples of the present. He died on 25 August 2021, at Dehiwala.

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Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Wikipedia. ‘Jayasiri Semage.’