Ranil Deraniyagala

Ranil Deraniyagala was the finest printmaker Sri Lanka produced in the twentieth century, and one of its most searching painters. Born in 1936 into a remarkable family, the son of the palaeontologist and museum director P.E.P. Deraniyagala, grandson of the historian Paul E. Pieris and nephew of the painter Justin Deraniyagala, he came to art through an English education, reading natural sciences at Cambridge and beginning medicine in London before he abandoned it, on the eve of his final examinations, for painting; the survey ‘Ceylon: A Painter’s Country’, shown at the South London Art Gallery in 1960, is said to have decided him. Ten years in Europe followed, spent studying the old masters and absorbing the shock of the new American painting, of Pollock and Rothko, and the European answer to it. He worked for some weeks with the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, and spent a year at the Slade School, where he mastered the intaglio techniques that would carry his finest work.

His mature work turned on the human figure, drawn with a complex, analytical energy he called a kind of expressionism, and on a line of extraordinary control that he perfected in engraving and etching after settling again in Sri Lanka. He worked for a time from a mud-and-thatch hut of his own design in the central hills, and later from a converted family manor, developing a body of graphic art that won notice in London and stands among the century’s best. A two-man exhibition with the Canadian painter Bruno Bobak at the Commonwealth Gallery in London drew the notice of the critic Eric Newton; he held a one-man show at the Lionel Wendt in Colombo in 1974 and a graphics show at the Belgrave Gallery in London in 1977. He described himself as a traditionalist, by which he meant a painter with one foot in the past and one in the future. His death in January 1978, at forty-two, cut the work short. He also wrote the first serious study of his uncle Justin, and so gave that greater painter back to the record.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.