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. 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.

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. 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 1978 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.