Solias Mendis

On the inner walls of the Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara, a few miles from Colombo, the long history of Buddhism on the island unfolds in continuous colour: the Buddha’s visits to Kelaniya and Mahiyangana, the coming of Vijaya, the bearing of the sacred Bo sapling and the tooth relic to Lanka. One painter, Walimuni Solias Mendis, gave some twenty years of his life to those walls, and they stand today as his monument.

He was born on 12 July 1897 at Madampe, near Chilaw, into a family that intended him for Ayurvedic medicine. He was drawn instead to painting, and learned it first from his uncle Memonis Silva, himself a master of the craft. To deepen it he travelled to India, studying the Buddhist cave paintings of Ajanta and Ellora and the sculpture of Sarnath, and returned resolved to marry the classical Sinhalese tradition to what he had seen.

The chance to do so came at Kelaniya. Helena Wijewardena, who was rebuilding the ancient temple, engaged Mendis to paint its new image house, and from about 1927 he worked there across roughly two decades, finishing near 1947. He broke with the older Kandyan convention of narrow horizontal registers and gave a whole wall to a single subject, modelling his figures with light and shadow so that the scenes carry real depth. The programme drew its episodes from the island’s own chronicles, and in doing so set the terms for the twentieth-century revival of Buddhist temple mural painting.

His work belonged to a wider current. In the decades around independence, painters, writers and patrons looked back towards a pre-colonial Sinhalese and Buddhist past in search of a national art, and Mendis’s murals, with their subjects taken from the Mahavamsa tradition, gave that revival its most complete visual statement. He pursued it in parallel to the salon academics and to the modernists of the ’43 Group, along a wholly different road: neither the European academy nor European modernism, but the temple wall and the classical line. The Kelaniya cycle, painted across those years between 1932 and 1946, has been read as a neo-classic reworking of the island’s classic age, looking back past the Kandyan school to the frescoes of Ajanta and drawing on the revivalist spirit of the Bengal school.

He was honoured with the title Kalaguru, master of the arts, and the state later placed his name and his Kelaniya work on a commemorative postage stamp. He died on 1 October 1975. At Kelaniya the walls he painted still draw the pilgrim and the visitor into the island’s own telling of its past, one wall and one scene at a time, exactly as he had arranged them.