Tissa Ranasinghe

Molten bronze runs into a mould in a studio in southwest London, and what rises from the cooling metal is not an English figure but Visvakarma, the divine artificer of Hindu myth, cast by a man who had carried the stories of Yogiyana across the world to make them. Tissa Ranasinghe spent a life bending a European craft to Sri Lankan ends. He learned the foundry in Britain and used it to give weight and permanence to the Buddhist and Hindu imagination he had grown up inside, so that the discipline of the West served the subjects of the East. To see how the two met in his hands, you have to start in a village, and in a college that had only just opened its doors.

He was born on 9 May 1925 in the village of Yogiyana. He trained at the College of Fine Arts in Colombo, which had opened in 1949, and took his diploma there in 1952. In 1958 he became the first Sri Lankan awarded a UNESCO Fellowship under its Creative Artists Scheme, and it carried him to Britain, to the Chelsea School of Art and then the Royal College of Art, where he took a certificate in bronze casting. The technique he mastered there, lost-wax casting, would stay the medium of his life.

His subjects came from the myth and religion of his homeland. He reworked the stories of Visvakarma, of Garuda the sun-bird, of Prince Siddhartha before his renunciation, and he made portrait sculptures of distinguished Sri Lankans, drawing, as one account of him put it, on a mind wholly aware of its heritage and the ancient sculptural sites behind it. The ’43 Group, which had gathered the island’s modern painters, recognised in him the sculptor it lacked: he exhibited with it by invitation in 1964, and though he never became a formal member, Aubrey Collette pressed to bring his statue of D.S. Senanayake home to Ceylon.

His working life moved between the two countries that had formed him. He was a visiting lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, taught at the Institute of Practical Technology at Katubedda, and served as principal of the Government College of Art and Art Crafts in Colombo in 1970 and 1971. He then returned to Britain and taught at the Royal College of Art, was elected a Fellow of it in 1989, and set up the studio in southwest London where he would work for the rest of his life. At home his standing was marked by the national honour of Kala Keerthi, and his work was gathered in the National Trust monograph ‘The Sculpture of Tissa Ranasinghe’, written by his friend and the Group’s chronicler, Neville Weereratne.

He died in London in November 2019, in the city where he had learned to pour bronze, still casting the gods of a village half a world away.