Reggie Candappa

At the ’43 Group’s exhibition of 1945, a single portrait hung under the name R.S.R. Candappa, a head of the artist-monk Manjusri, which a reviewer thought ‘a delightful and spontaneous bit of work’ and wished there were more of. There would be more, though most of it would go into a different kind of picture. Reggie Candappa gave his largest energies to building the advertising trade of Ceylon, and is remembered as much for that as for the canvases he showed beside the modern painters.

He was born in Colombo on 14 May 1919. His mother died when he was an infant and his father gave him up at three months, a hard beginning; at St Joseph’s College a teacher, J.P. de Fonseka, saw that the boy could draw and put illustration work his way. He trained himself in practice rather than in an art school, later studying architecture, and from 1946 he spent more than a decade at Lake House, learning printing and production from the inside.

From that grounding came the work that carried his name furthest. In 1957 a scholarship took him to study American advertising, and he returned to found and lead the Colombo agency that became Grant McCann Erickson, professionalising a trade that had scarcely existed as one on the island; he is widely called the father of advertising in Sri Lanka. His daughter, Neela Marikkar, later succeeded him in the business, which gives some measure of how far the enterprise outlasted its beginnings.

The painting was never set aside. He held four one-man shows across his life, and the fine-art standing was recognised plainly in his later years: the Ceylon Society of Arts gave him its ‘Kalapathy’ award in 1988 and made him a trustee, and the state conferred the national title of Deshabandu in 1993. His portrait and figure work sat alongside a career that did more than any other single figure to make Ceylonese commercial art a profession.

He died on 6 December 2003. The portrait of Manjusri that hung in 1945 is the reminder that the man now filed under commerce began among the painters, and kept a hand in both rooms to the end.