Walter Kalasooriya

The wave of December 2004 took the Visiki gallery and much of the work inside it, and with it a large part of one painter’s life. Walter Kalasooriya had trained in the Colombo art school of the 1960s and built a gallery of his own; the loss of it is part of why his name is less known than it should be.

He was born on 11 April 1945 at Demataluwa. He studied at the College of Fine Arts under a roll of teachers who between them trained much of the Late Modern generation, among them Stanley Abeysinghe, David Paynter, S.P. Charles, Henry Dharmasena and Gunasiri Kolambage, and he exhibited both in Sri Lanka and abroad. In 1996 he completed a painting of the Sinharaja rain forest some hundred metres long, recognised as the longest painting in the world, and he worked in a pigment technique of his own that he called ‘Earth Color’, ground from natural earths. Between 1996 and 2005 his painting drew a succession of Presidential and Prime Minister’s awards. He ran the Visiki Art Gallery until the 2004 tsunami destroyed it, along with much of his work.

His formation in the 1960s and his working life through the decades that followed place him among the Late Modern middle generation, the painters who came up after the ’43 Group and before the contemporary movement. Because so much of the work was lost, the surviving record is thin, and images of what remains are the more valuable for it.

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Selected works

Much of the artist’s work was destroyed with the Visiki gallery in the 2004 tsunami; a surviving image is to be supplied.