Stanley Kirinde

On a working evening in Colombo, a senior official of the state set down the files of the Ministry of Defence, took up a brush, and turned to the sitter he painted more often than any other, his wife Iranganie. Stanley Kirinde carried two lives at once and let neither crowd out the other: through thirty-five years in the administrative service he kept painting, and the patience that governed the one governed the other. To understand how a man came to enter the ranks of Sri Lanka’s major painters late and without noise, you have to begin with that double life, and with a boy who won his first prize before he had left school.

He was born in 1930, schooled at Trinity College in Kandy from the age of nine, and took an honours degree in history at the University of Ceylon. At fifteen he won first prize at the All-Ceylon Education Exhibition of 1945, an early sign of a gift he would never make his living from. His career instead ran through the offices of the state: he served as Additional Secretary of Defence and as State Secretary of Trade and Shipping, and had a hand in founding the Kotelawala Defence Academy. Painting stayed his private discipline, pursued in the hours the service left him.

His subject was people in their settings, and his sympathy for ordinary lives, as one contemporary put it, continued unabated. He painted self-portraits and his family over decades, his studies of Iranganie counted among his finest, and he brought the same steady eye to portraiture on a public scale. He began exhibiting with the ’43 Group in March 1955, showing three paintings in its ninth exhibition, and remained one of its constant later associates as the founder generation aged and the movement wound towards its close.

His reach extended well past Colombo. From the late 1970s he exhibited in London, Fukuoka, Washington and Dhaka; he painted the official portrait of the Indian President K.R. Narayanan, hung at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi; and his work entered the President’s House at Colombo and Kandy, with a work owned by the Prince of Wales. The measure of his standing came in May 1983, when the Sapumal Foundation, the ’43 Group’s surviving home, gave him a one-man show; its introduction judged that he had by then entered ‘the ranks of Sri Lanka’s major painters’. In 2005 the state he had served conferred on him the title of Deshabandu.

He died in 2009, his life recorded in the biography ‘The World of Stanley Kirinde’. The gift that had announced itself in a schoolboy’s prize was carried, in the end, not by early acclaim but by the same patience that had kept him at the easel on all those evenings after the files were closed.