Nalini Jayasuriya

A biblical subject painted in an Asian hand hung in New York, and the same conviction had already carried Nalini Jayasuriya’s work to Jerusalem, to Manila and to Tokyo: she made sacred art her life’s single subject, and she made it Sri Lankan. Where the church’s imagery had long arrived in the island wearing a European face, she turned it the other way, so that the Gospel scenes came out in the line and colour of her own culture, and a Christian consciousness spoke, in her phrase, through an Asian one with respect for all confessions of religious faith.

She was born in 1927 and came to painting largely without formal art schooling, one gift among several: she was also a musician, a potter, a writer, a broadcaster and a lecturer, and she brought that breadth to a body of work built on Christian and biblical themes. During a period of study in London she took evening classes in stained glass and in enamel on metal, widening the means through which she could carry a single sacred idea, and her practice ran from painting into pottery, sculpture and the written word without losing its centre.

The scholarship came later and abroad. She took a Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School and went on to lecture on sacred art there and at Tokyo University, and between 2001 and 2003 she served as the first artist-in-residence at the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, a post that set her work squarely within the study of Christianity as a world, rather than a Western, faith. Her paintings were shown in Manila, London, Bangkok, Paris, Toronto, Tokyo, Jerusalem and New York, and in 2007 she was among the five artists in ‘The Christian Story: Five Asian Artists Today’ at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York. At home she was given Sri Lanka’s highest honour for the arts.

She died in 2014, internationally the best-known Sri Lankan painter of sacred art, having spent a career proving that the island’s visual traditions could hold the Christian story as fully as Europe’s had. The painting that hung in New York carried the whole argument on its surface: a Western subject, an Eastern hand, and a maker who saw the meeting of the two as her purpose rather than her problem.