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 1938 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.

His place in the Late Modern section is a matter of period rather than manner. He worked squarely in the decades after the ’43 Group, but in a traditional, historical-narrative idiom rather than the modernism of many of his contemporaries, closer to the revivalist current than to abstraction. He died on 25 August 2021, at Dehiwala.

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Selected works

An image of one of the large historical or narrative paintings is to be supplied.