Stanley Kirinde

In 1960 Stanley Kirinde broke a village headman into planes and facets after Picasso’s Three Musicians, the first fully Cubist picture he painted; forty years later he laid a Pali stanza of loving kindness in gold and colour across the page like a medieval scribe. Between those two works lies the whole of his art, which held past and present together, the classical and the modern, in a single hand. He did it in stolen hours. Through thirty-five years in the Ceylon administrative service, latterly as an Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, he set down the files in the evening and took up the brush.

A self-taught eye

He was born in 1930 at Deegala, in the Dumbara valley near Gampola, into an old Kandyan family whose forebears had served the kings of Gampola, and was christened Sarathchandra Madduma Bandara Wickremasinghe Kirinde. Schooled at Trinity College in Kandy from the age of eight, he was a prodigy whose art master, the Burgher painter Harry Hardy, recognised his gift and left him to find his own way, and at fifteen he won first place at the All Ceylon Education Exhibition of 1945. He read history, not art, taking an honours degree at the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya, and he never attended an art school in his life. His training came from two sources he taught himself to hold together. From the Kandyan temple murals of Degaldoruwa and their kind he took a flat, bright narrative language of red, yellow and white, and a precise line; from the Italian Renaissance, studied in books and reproductions, he taught himself to draw the human figure, copying the anatomical studies of Leonardo and Michelangelo so closely that he published an essay on Michelangelo in his school magazine at nineteen. The murals David Paynter had painted in the Trinity College chapel, classical in their handling of the figure yet made for a Ceylonese shrine, showed him that the two could meet, the temple tradition and the Renaissance figure held on a single wall.

From the village to Cubism

His first mature paintings belong to the early 1950s and to the Kandyan village he had grown up in. Village Scene and Bathers, both of 1952, set lush foliage and full-bodied women in a Sri Lankan setting, the women owing something to Gauguin and the grouped bathers to Cezanne, with the first hints of a Cubist geometry beneath. His posting as a land officer to Polonnaruwa and then Badulla turned his eye to labour and the Dry Zone, and through the 1960s that geometry hardened into Cubism proper. Village Headman at Work of 1960, worked after Picasso, was the first picture he took the whole way. He borrowed Cubism’s faceting and its decorative pattern while keeping the human figure legible, declining the dissective philosophy that came with it. ‘I was wondering whether I could accommodate Cubism and retain the figure,’ he said.

Once, in 1964, he let feeling break through. The Petitioner shows a peasant come to lodge his case, his wife beside him carrying the papers, and Kirinde distorts the scene to drive home their hardship. A great hand, knuckled and swollen by a life of labour, fills the middle of the picture; the petition itself, a white square larger than the man’s head, is the one thing painted plainly, because without it he is another face in the crowd. The colours are drained to spent greys and blues, robbed of their force on purpose, and the brightest thing the petitioner owns is the faded striped muffler at his neck. It is the nearest he came to the intensity of Ivan Peries, and he chose never to paint that way again, holding that distortion and ugliness were alien to what art was for.

The turn to a national art

The turn came in the 1970s. Wearied of modernism, and shaken by the youth insurrection of 1971, Kirinde came to doubt whether a borrowed European art answered Sri Lanka’s needs, and he set out to root his work in the island’s own inheritance, convinced that an art severed from its own traditions had lost its worth. He returned to the frescoes of Polonnaruwa’s tivanka shrine and to Kandyan temple art, and he began to paint landscape, the Jataka tales and, above all, the ornamented forms he had loved since childhood.

Miniature painting became his new passion. Harry Pieris, the ’43 Group’s secretary who had first drawn him into the modern movement, unrolled for him a set of Mughal drawings thick with gold and silver, and Kirinde was captivated by work grand in conception and jewel-fine in execution. Woman with Peacock of 1981 shows what the discovery gave him. Set within a decorated border in the Mughal manner, brilliant with colour, it places a bare-breasted woman at its centre as an image of fertility, her body arched into the trunk of a tree and framed by the emerald fan of a peacock. The barren tree answers her with life: the branches fill with the island’s rarest and most vivid birds, the blue magpie, the paradise flycatcher, the black-headed oriole, each studied from a birdbook and coloured exactly, every leaf and every feather picked out in the miniature tradition.

From the miniature he moved to the Jataka tales, the stories of the Buddha’s former births, painting them first in watercolour and then on very large oil canvases through the 1980s; the Asadisa Jataka of 1994 runs to nearly two metres. He took up the medieval illuminated manuscript in the same decade, weaving text, image and ornament into a single page. His first, the Karaniya Metta Sutra of 1989, the verses of loving kindness his mother had recited, sets his own division at its plainest: a radiant male figure of virtue, modelled on Michelangelo’s David, faces a crooked Cubist demon that stands for the modern art he had come to distrust, its floral borders worked up from Kandyan temple design, after L.T.P. Manjusri’s Design Elements, yet entirely his own invention.

Sri Lanka’s history entered his work at the same time. He admired the Mexican muralists, Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, for an art that was national and public at once, and he painted the island’s own past in the same spirit: The Battle of Dutugamunu and Elara in 1969, and other episodes of the national story in the years that followed. His first public commission, for the Sri Lanka Military Academy at Diyatalawe, he made not in paint but in porcelain mosaic, because no canvas ran large enough: The Uva Rebellion of 1817 to 1818, more than two metres of it, scarlet-coated British infantry hunting a handful of cornered Kandyan rebels across the Uva hills. Scarlet porcelain could be found nowhere, so he lacquered the red pieces coat after coat until they gleamed, and a temple painter from a hereditary line set them to the wall across six months, following the charcoal cartoon Kirinde had scaled up from inches to feet.

Portraits, poems and the reach of the work

The reach of his subjects was wide. He drew his family across the decades, his wife Iranganie above all, married in 1958 and the model for portrait after idealised portrait of the Sinhala beauty; his single self-portrait dates from 1951. Among the ’43 Group founders he admired Justin Daraniyagala most, and answered his Head and Girl with Goldfish with his own Conversation Piece of 1964 and Woman Draping her Sari of 1967. When his youngest brother Gamini died at thirty-seven in 1982, he set the loss down in a series of pen drawings of vultures, battle and mourning. Between 1957 and 1969 he filled a rare edition of the Bengali love-poems of Vidyapati, given him by the university librarian Ian Goonetileke, with drawings of Radha and Krishna that abandoned his usual reserve, sensuous, tender and among his finest work. He studied the Kandyan vannam, the eighteen solo dances, in watercolour; he illustrated the sixteenth-century Salalihini Sandesa and the Pali Jayamangala Gatha chanted at Sinhalese weddings; he painted the matter of Lanka, its kings and its battles, and Christian subjects too, indigenised, a Badulla chapel given a Mary robed as a Kandyan village woman and a Saint John bearing a monk’s alms bowl. He restored David Paynter’s chapel murals at Trinity, illustrated a shelf of books, and in 1997 painted the triptych Embassy to Rome for the Foreign Ministry, an ancient Lankan mission before Augustus, commissioned by his lifelong friend Lakshman Kadirgamar. Before the 1981 visit of Queen Elizabeth II, President Jayewardene had set him to paint the island’s past rulers in a historical series and, on the historian K.M. de Silva’s advice, two large oils after Philippus Baldaeus’s seventeenth-century account of Ceylon, which hang at President’s House in Kandy and Colombo. Landscape ran alongside the rest: invited by Senake Bandaranayake to the Sigiriya project, he drew the great rock through 1993, and in 1998 held ‘Reflections on Sigiriya’, his first exhibition given wholly to landscape, with J.M.W. Turner, a lifelong favourite, sometimes echoed in the watercolours.

The greatest of the commissions came in 2000, when the government of India invited him to paint the official portrait of its President, K.R. Narayanan, a commission extended to only a handful of foreign painters; the portrait hangs at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. He did not charge for it.

The double life, and its reckoning

Painting was always the evening’s work. He joined the Ceylon administrative service in 1956 and served as a district land officer at Polonnaruwa, Badulla and Nuwara Eliya, as assistant registrar at the University of Peradeniya from 1969, and from 1974 at the Ministry of Defence, where he rose to Additional Secretary before retiring in 1990; he was also State Secretary of Trade and Shipping. Recognition as a painter came slowly, and largely after he laid the files down. He first exhibited with the ’43 Group in March 1955, showing three paintings in its ninth exhibition, showed again in its tenth, and remained one of its later associates as the founding generation aged. His work travelled: the Smithsonian chose him as one of five for a touring exhibition of Sri Lankan art in 1979, and he showed at Fukuoka in 1980, at the Asian Art Show in Bangladesh in 1981, and at the Commonwealth Institute in London the same year. His first solo exhibition waited until May 1983, at the Sapumal Foundation, the ’43 Group’s old home; the note that accompanied it placed him at last among the major painters of the island. His paintings entered the Fukuoka Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and one was acquired by the Prince of Wales. In 2005 the state he had served conferred on him the title of Deshabandu, and he died in 2009.

He had set out, in his last decades, to be a national painter in the fullest sense, an artist who could take in the Renaissance, Cubism, the Mughal miniature and the Mexican mural and keep his work rooted in the island’s own soil, and that ambition shaped the whole of the late work. His temper was one of reserve rather than storm, and he held by choice to composure over intensity, so that The Petitioner stands a little apart from the rest, the painter of raw power he chose not to become. The gift that had announced itself in a schoolboy’s prize was carried, in the end, by the same quiet persistence.

Sources

1. Tammita-Delgoda, SinhaRaja. The World of Stanley Kirinde. Colombo: Stanley Kirinde Felicitation Committee.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
3. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
4. stanleykirinde.com. ‘Biographical Notes.’ http://stanleykirinde.com/biography.html
5. Wijesinghe, Mahinda. ‘Stanley Kirinde: The Gentle and Cultured Artist’. eLanka. https://www.elanka.com.au/stanley-kirinde-the-gentle-and-cultured-artist-mahinda-wijesinghe/