Laki Senanayake

A drawing of a double coconut palm, made while its author idled in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya, hangs today over the main chamber of Sri Lanka’s Parliament, worked in silver-plated brass at the scale of a room. The man who drew it, Laki Senanayake, spent a working life turning a line on paper into forms a person could stand beneath, and he did it first as the draughtsman whose hand lay behind some of the most admired buildings on the island. He thought of himself at once as artist, sculptor, gardener and inventor, and he refused, to the end, to be fixed to any single trade.

Boyhood, birds and the making of an eye

He was born on 18 December 1937, the seventh of eight children, into a rural Ceylon then turning against imperial rule. His father, Reginald, was a founder member and the first treasurer of the newly formed Lanka Sama Samaja Party; his mother, a former teacher, stood after her husband’s early death as Member of Parliament for Kirella and became the first woman in the island’s first parliament. Drawing filled the boy from the age of three, and the family took to calling him the artist. Bouts of malaria through his boyhood kept him from the classroom and, by his own telling, gave him licence to follow his own inclinations; his first materials were coloured school chalk crushed with gum arabic, his first subjects the red woodpeckers, blue kingfishers, yellow orioles and green parakeets of the coconut estate at Madampe where his mother had gone to work.

At Royal College he won the school art prize in 1954 for a trapeze artist drawn after Toulouse-Lautrec, and spent the winnings on G. M. Henry’s Birds of Ceylon, which turned his eye from the colour of birds to the natural world that held them. Music arrived at the same time. When he saw Walt Disney’s Fantasia in 1947 he was astonished by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and from then on an appetite for music beyond the Romantic ran alongside his drawing and fed it for the rest of his life.

The draughtsman in the Bawa circle

In 1958, at twenty-one and lately dismissed from an architect’s office for organising its draughtsmen into a union, he took a post with the architect Valentine Gunasekara, drawn partly by Gunasekara’s collection of classical recordings. At Gunasekara’s weekly discussions he first met Geoffrey Bawa, and through Geoffrey his brother Bevis, for whom he made his first perspective drawings, of a tourist scheme at Fort Frederick in Trincomalee. Geoffrey Bawa, delighted with the sheets, took him on to draught, and there a small rebellion set the course of his art: bored by the standardised way architects’ offices drew trees, he began drawing them as they actually grew on the elevations of the buildings. Trees he had until then seen only as perches for his birds, and drawing them as they grew led him, by way of botanical study, into the landscape gardening of his later years.

At Bevis Bawa’s house he met the Australian artist Donald Friend, then at the height of his powers, whose pen and ink marked the young draughtsman deeply; when Friend left the island in 1962 he gave Laki his paintbox of brushes, inks and paints. Laki worked full time with Geoffrey Bawa and his Danish partner Ulrik Plesner for some six or seven years, until around 1963 he left the salaried office, while Bawa was in Rome, to give himself to work of his own. The parting freed him without breaking the bond, for he went on modelling and drawing the sculptural detail of Bawa’s buildings for decades afterwards, so that the architecture of the island’s finest modern houses and hotels, and the ornament within them, came from a single circle of friends. In the mid-1960s he joined the survey of the island’s fast-vanishing vernacular buildings that Ulrik Plesner had begun, measuring and drawing them alongside his old friend Ismeth Raheem, and the archive grew over thirty years into the book that he, Ronald Lewcock and Barbara Sansoni would publish as The Architecture of an Island, a first gathering of which had appeared in 1978 as Vihares and Verandas.

The line, and the widening of the mediums

The line was the root of everything, and Laki guarded its life above all. He learned to draw fast because a line drawn slowly went slack: when he laboured over it, he found, it lost its tension, and the subject lost the appeal that a taut line had given it. His instrument of choice became a porcupine quill, prized because it let the mark swell and thin at a touch where an ordinary pen laid down a dead, even line; at times he painted a shape in water first and drew into the bleed, for an edge no brush could make.

That restless line ran out across an extraordinary range of materials. Around 1963 he left Bawa’s office to make batik with Ena de Silva, seven years of it, work that helped found Ena de Silva Fabrics: ceiling batiks for his mother’s house and Barbara Sansoni’s, hangings for a London boardroom, backdrops for the theatre. He printed silk-screens, among them the 1972 portfolio Dalliance, twenty sensual prints that announced a major artist, and later screen prints on canvas; he took rubbings from tree bark in the Peradeniya gardens and from a manhole cover in Kandy and worked them into images. At the end of the 1970s he designed a complete set of Sri Lankan bank notes, issued in 1979, that put his knowledge of the island’s birds and plants to use and took first prize at the international numismatics exposition at the Paris Bourse in 1984. Plaster and papier-mâché, the James Finlay building mural in Colombo of 1983 and the forty-two-foot wall of the Lanka-Libya building by the Beira Lake in 1990, currency and stage sets: the tools changed, the drawn line beneath them held. His own shows were fewer than his commissions, but they ran from a first one-man exhibition at the Lionel Wendt Gallery in 1957 to the silk-screen show ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ at the Barefoot Gallery in 1985, after which Dominic Sansoni became his agent. He founded practices as readily as he changed mediums, the architectural firm Enviroplan in 1980, the garden-design firm Botanica and the art-screen company Quagga among them; and in 1963, with Reggie Siriwardena and the lawyer P. Nadesan, he helped found the Civil Rights Movement, in which he stayed active for a decade.

The sculpture

The work that carried his name furthest was the sculpture, and it moved through a startling range of metals. For the Sri Lankan pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition at Osaka he made a giant bo leaf, the leaf of the tree under which the Buddha gained enlightenment and a fitting emblem for two Buddhist nations. Forty feet high and worked in bronze-anodised aluminium, it proved too costly to ship home, so it stayed in Japan, and only the brass and copper maquette came back. A bronze peacock followed for the lobby of Bawa’s Bentota Beach Hotel in 1970, and for the conference room of Bawa’s Agricultural Research Building in Colombo he cast four sculptures in lead, some of them silvered. The double-coconut chandelier of palm fronds raised over the Parliament chamber, undertaken in 1980 and finished the next year, he worked in silver-plated brass; the flying owl for the head of the staircase at Bawa’s Kandalama Hotel, dated 1991 and shown the following August, he cut from sheet metal; the sculpture running the whole spiral of the staircase at the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle, in 1995, he made in brass and copper, preferring it to a drawn line because, he said, it held the space as a line could not. His method was patient and empirical: he would settle the balance of a piece in a wire armature, then build a mock-up in galvanised sheet iron before committing to the final, which had the happy result of leaving him a copy of his own.

The evolution of a style

His style refused, deliberately, to settle. He began in the boyhood realism of birds and rocks and waterfalls; in his youth he painted his way through the museums, from Rembrandt to Picasso, until he was told he had a copyist’s gift and no invention of his own, and went back with relief to the things he had always loved. Under Donald Friend’s influence came the pen-and-ink work he called his ‘fey fantasies’, tight dramatic compositions of cliffs and seas and crowds that Lewcock judges more effective than the coloured medievalism of the older artist who prompted them, and beside these a body of painting driven by Stravinsky. Cora Abraham, who had drawn him back to painting, once told him he would never have a style of his own, and he owned it to be partly true, since his architectural drawings, his bird and plant studies and his fantasies were each a different hand.

A constant held beneath the variety. His naturalism was forever tilting towards abstraction, so that a study of birds among plants would, in the describing, almost become an abstract composition of splayed leaf and superimposed branch. In his last decades the tilt went the whole way. Listening to the chance-driven music of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, he let the same principle into his painting, setting blank sheets beside a work in progress to catch the paint that would otherwise go to waste and building canvases up from there, in stages he photographed as they grew. He likened the method to eating ice cream, plunging straight in rather than planning the meal, and holding to no fixed goal, since a goal not reached only disappoints. His touch had been marked from his student years by Abstract Expressionism, and here at the end that strain came into its own. Beneath it all lay a single argument, the one Lewcock draws from the whole body of the work: that the academic measures of anatomy, tonal shading and proportion could be set aside, so that shape and line and tone and colour might make their own impact.

Diyabubula

Around 1970 he withdrew from Colombo and the art market to the Dry Zone near Dambulla, to a five-acre property called Diyabubula that he made into a water garden and a home. He raised the house on a rock between two lakes he had engineered himself, ten feet above the water and open to the air, and from it he watched the otters, the thalagoya and the fifty species of bird that came, drawing and planting and swimming among them while the cuttings he carried back from Peradeniya slowly turned the farm into forest. I write this account in part from my own conversation with Laki at Diyabubula, among the last he gave, not long before his death there on 30 May 2021. The draughtsman who had given other men’s buildings their finishing hand had built, at the last, a place of his own, and let the wild come into it. His art, in Ronald Lewcock’s judgement, reached ‘levels of visual sensation and delight that have seldom been surpassed in Sri Lanka’.

Sources

1. Lewcock, Ronald. Laki. Colombo: The Geoffrey Bawa Trust.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
3. Robson, David. Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
4. Wikipedia. ‘Laki Senanayake.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki_Senanayake
5. Diyabubula. ‘About Diyabubula’. https://www.diyabubula.com/about/
6. Diyabubula. ‘Remembering Laki Senanayake (1937–2021)’.
7. Roar Media. ‘Remembering Laki Senanayake (1937–2021).’ https://archive.roar.media/english/life/identities/laki-senanayake-in-memoriam