Somabandu Vidyapathi

Born in 1923 at Pannipitiya, into a family of traditional painters, dancers and makers of stage and ritual craft, Somabandu Vidyapathi went in 1945 to Santiniketan and studied, as several of his countrymen did, under Nandalal Bose, and afterwards at the Travancore school of art in Kerala. From that grounding he built a manner that joined the classical mural traditions of Asia to the language of the modern movement, and carried the temple-mural tradition into the last years of the twentieth century.

His great work came late. Between 1990 and 1998 he painted the murals of the Bellanwila Raja Maha Vihara, near Colombo, in oil, one of the largest and most admired programmes of Buddhist temple painting the century produced. In him the line that runs from the old Sittara through the neo-classic revival of Solias Mendis reaches the present day.

The Bellanwila cycle shows how he made the tradition modern. Thirteen scenes cover the shrine-hall walls, the largest some six metres by fourteen, and though he laid them in oil he refused the medium’s usual density: the paint is worked thin and left transparent, the brush-strokes allowed to show, so that the wall keeps something of the lightness of watercolour and of the old lime-ground fresco. The palette is the classical one, yellows and reds and browns against black, and the drawing looks back past the Kandyan school to the Tivanka image house at Polonnaruwa and to the Ajanta line behind it. What he added was the modern painter’s freedom with space and modelling, so that the ancient manner carries a depth the temple wall had not held before. It is that marriage, the classical programme rendered in a loosened, luminous modern hand, that the phrase ‘Somabandu tradition’ now names. He died in 2006.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. de Zoysa, Asoka, and Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka. Buddhist Image Houses.
3. de Zoysa, Asoka, Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka, and Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka. Evolving Traditions of the Buddhist Image House, Part I. Samkathana Research Team, University of Kelaniya.