Professor S.B. Dissanayake

Anoma’s work is suffused with swelling currents of ideas and feelings related to Buddhist Sri Lanka and Islamic Central Asia. Given that the relationships between cultures and religions have gained new significance in the 21st century, Anoma’s concerns about them are not exceptional. Being a painter she has followed her natural inclination to express her feelings with brush and paint. In every work can be found a focal point from which the defining quality of the whole series seems to issue. For her, movement, change and transformation as a phase of contemporary art have come to an end, together with contemporary ideas based on 20th century isms, which have been exhausted by habitual use. She has jettisoned some old and new judgments of aesthetic quality in favour of the “voices of silence.”

In these paintings she seeks to express the currents of feelings that surge beneath ideological and religious relationships. Her paintings do not seek to inform us about Islam and Buddhism so much as about the artist herself. She is intent above all on healing, self-healing and healing between nations and cultures and religions; between ideologies and forms of government. It is also about the erosion of solitude, privacy and personal space in the modern world. Not surprisingly, she echoes and re-echoes in every work in this series the sentiments of Albert Camus; “There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve man better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigour, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength?”

Anoma is a wandering spirit and her eclectic interests extend from all forms of the visual arts to music and theatre, nature and the environment. She lives in an enclosed house and garden, more Medieval than Moorish, right in the heart of the urban developments of Colombo. While painting, she listens to music. Books surround her. She is not like one of the ‘new generation of painters’ of which Cézanne complained almost a hundred years ago. This new generation spawned an era of looking toward ‘theories’ rather than ‘sensations’ and looking toward the ‘ready made’ rather than ‘nature.’ In her present work, based on the recalled sensations of a time past, everything leads “towards the frontiers of a coherent realization of a promised land”. An expression Cézanne used repeatedly about his paintings.

Born and schooled in both Sri Lanka and Kodaikanal, South India, Anoma proceeded to study art in London and graduated from Central St. Martins College of Art. Recognizing her origins and interests, not to mention her talents, Liberty’s of London then sponsored her return to Central St. Martins for post graduate studies. Following an award from the Crafts Council of Great Britain to further pursue her ideas in textiles and tapestries, she decided to remain in London and her work was seen in collections at Contemporary Applied Arts, the House of Commons, the Victoria & Albert and of course Liberty’s of Regent Street.

In the 1980’s her designs were sold in New York, Paris, Milan, Frankfurt, and Tokyo and her clients included Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Cardin, Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent. Her work was featured in Vogue, Harpers & Queen, Architectural Digest, and the World of Interiors. This led her into teaching assignments at Bath Academy, Somerset College of Art and a return to Central St. Martins, her alma mater, as a lecturer. It has sharpened her analytical and critical faculties and her fluency in verbalizing her ideas about art. As a painter, she has exhibited her work in England, Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka.

It is with this unique amalgam of gifts and experience that Anoma paints and it is this amalgam which profoundly influences the direction of her work. Her sense of history as expressed in her present series of paintings is set around internalized icons from visual sources in the archeological sites of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka and the architectural remains along the Silk route. For the artist, everything takes place today, even if it happened yesterday. Places and events from the past remain elusive fragments that cannot be arranged in any coherent manner. Hence her decision to juxtapose the Buddhist and the Islamic in this exhibition, shoring them up, as it were, next to each other, without any recourse to integrating them. Perhaps the only unifying visual element would be Anoma’s self conscious yet lyrical brushwork. It is the paint itself that consistently reveals the artist’s sensibility, sometimes giving off a heightened appeal and sometimes a subdued one.

Oscar Wilde’s stricture that ‘art is a veil and not a mirror’ is an apt description of Anoma’s Islamic subject matter and particular iconography. They are veiled in a Turner-like light, some almost a mirage. The Buddhist subjects are draped with bright curtains of light. In Quest or Surging Truth the light becomes the aura of the enlightened one. In Renunciation the standing Buddha’s robe glints and the painter’s attention to detail is most remarkable and a striking exercise in chiaroscuro. The illumination comes from within and without and the light begins to engulf at that point where renunciation leads to enlightenment. In Rare is the appearance of the enlightened ones the artist expresses her ideas about access to the spiritual through a veiled window. Like a lover at the window of his beloved, here the spiritual and the sensual become one and the same. Behind the layers of glaze the veiled moonstone suggests the idea of the steps of learning and enlightenment.

Anoma invests all her Buddhist subjects with a certain geological scale and feeling, as if they have been returned to a state of nature and become part of the natural order of things. Interestingly, she seems to echo the sentiments of Marguerite Yourcena in her Memoirs of Hadrian: “There is nothing more easily destroyed than the equilibrium attained over the centuries of the fair places… but the slightest imprudence inflicted upon stone… does something irreparable, and forever. The beauty goes… and authenticity likewise.” I suspect that the artist would like these ruins preserved for our private possession, for our imagination, as emanations of a landscape, its genie loci.

With kaleidoscopic effects in her multi-media works, layer upon thin layer of paint in her oils on canvas, she creates a poetic vision. The paintings are meetings and encounters and an artist’s archetypal imaginings about them; in constellations of awakenings, combining the flashback, the close-up and the montage techniques of cinema and photography. Anoma’s impressionistic approach is most appropriate because it is based on the memories of a single visual experience. In Shrouded Doorway, the richly decorated arched entrance to a place of prayer, with perhaps a prayer mat in the foreground shows the spiritual dimensions of Islam. It is also a discourse on the use of blue in religious art and architecture. As Vassily Kandinsky noted “the deeper the blue becomes, the more urgently it summons man towards the infinite.” The use of Kufic scripts and calligraphic texts in the works emphasize the decorative elements in Moorish Art. The blues and terracotta’s suggest the desert locations of these sites and the falcon enters into many desert cultures, from the Horus of ancient Egypt to the present day. In Runic Falcon collage is meaningfully used to bring together the various symbols of Koranic culture.

These paintings can also be looked upon as her “dividend”, from the emotional investments she has made in her own past and our collective heritage. It is by contemplating the bare surfaces of her canvases, as practitioners of Zen are wont to do and the applying of layer upon layer of paint that she makes her subjects emerge; some from behind the veils of her artifice, others in front of the curtains of light as on a stage. They interact and interface in the theater of an exhibition space.

A conscientious viewer who moves on from the individual works to the total impact will find the artist’s intentions and her sense of wonder. For these are paintings that transform lazy minds into mental life. Anoma’s art is an incitement to our imagination - for her it is her fulfillment. The notion that we can receive truth from nobody, and that we should create it ourselves applies to all learning experiences, and to her the limit of the magic in a work of art is only the start of ours. No postmodern anxieties in her art, no unearned emotions.

Anoma confronts us with an art that is a unique blend of inwardness and rhetoric, mediating and declaiming at the same time. The inwardness of these works, a blend easily wrested one way or another by stressing either the personal or the universal, makes it possible for these works to be read as parables of contemporary concerns about building a harmonious world order.

In Quest the colour conveys feelings of geological time and historical time while the steps leading into an inner sanctum with relief carvings suggests man’s quest through art. Or is it that in these works we see the political collide with the aesthetic and the purely spiritual? - Or is it that in Buddhism, there is a collision of iconoclasts and idolaters? Anoma has discovered the interpersonal acoustic between religions which helps shape her message of richness in diversity. The silences in each and the silences they share can have the effect of a single utterance, of something implied as against the outpoured.

Perhaps we should take a cue from the belief that symbolism leads to divinity. The Arabs believed that there are a hundred names for water as there are a hundred names for god; and the Hindus have a thousand names for Lalitha - in the long term meanings will always become contingent, historical – even unintended.

In the modern world nothing really separates writing, which we imagine only communicates, from painting, which we believe, only expresses. The modern agenda is to put all writing and all art in a palimpsest and to make this palimpsest inexhaustible; a tabula rasa, ever erased, ever written on, but not to be read as a text. To be seen, looked at as a picture. A visual experience at first and then something to echo through you.

The voice of the painter has been filtered through a more self consciously literary sensibility. Here is an honest evocation of place and time in contemporary Asia. It manages to be both affectionate and despairing. For contrast, there is the depiction of an alienating contemporary restoration in Sri Lanka of a dagoba with a Bo-leaf, less considerately observed and therefore more expressionistic than her portrayal of the Central Asian sites. In the latter Anoma has, with Klimt-like meticulous care, shown the faience mosaic, domes and minarets of tombs and mosques. An example being the Shahi Zinda, a blue ghost of a building in her conception.
Similarly, by emphasizing the signs of weathering in her rendering of the restored Ruwanvali Maha Saya she comments on the rampant restoration work that has been carried out everywhere.

In these evocative creations of two worlds the artist never sinks into nostalgia. Instead they convey a sense of time and flux and the emergence of a world heritage sans frontiers. The landscapes in these paintings will recede into language or remain a neutral background against which are projected anxieties that might beset anyone about the past. Perhaps for that reason, these paintings do not appear to represent the geographical boundaries of continental Central Asia and island Sri Lanka. They transcend those limitations. The purely religious is relegated to the background and the cultural is emphasized. They merge in a common human heritage.

Anoma’s talent for transcribing intimacy, a talent that has been glimpsed and admired in her earlier work, has been transformed in her new work into a world-view of a world riven with conflicts, fragmented, tenuous, allusive and sparse. It is a provocative view of the world.
There is in these works a sense of the edge between lived and imagined life and the juxtaposition of linear time and the infinite. One detects also serendipitous artistic couplings that are insightful and diverting to the more perceptive viewer. Her interest in the collision of religions and mythologies is perhaps part of the state of her own soul. In such matters she certainly leaves more space for our own imagination. The reflected and refracted light in these canvases is the only visible sign of spiritual presence. These ideas are embodied in Refracted resonance’s which is the most abstract in this collection and is like a musical composition with distinct pauses and resonance’s, obliquely echoing the waves of sound one associates with the daily call to prayer in wild open landscapes.

The past we think we know about is by definition a creation of our own state of mind in the present, just as, conversely, what we think we know about the past conditions our apprehension of the here and now. The paintings are sublimed with a kind of “mineral fury” as in illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy by Botticelli, Gustave Dore and others. The Buddha images in some of her canvases occupy the Dantesque “ditto mezzo” or “accurate middle” of a triangulated design. She reconstructs to bring together two distinct and overlapping cultures in a kind of “Auto-oneirography” - the translation or transcription of one's own dreams.

The arts of Asia and Sri Lanka will be coloured for some time to come by a far stronger emotional relationship to our Indian or Asian location, as well as our past and our future. We live in a culture where memory, narration, the romantic story and hope for change still function, and where existential links to a specific place has not lost its meaning. Anoma has returned to her birthplace. It may be a positive thing for her art, as well as for the art of the region. She has focused or gathered her painterly shrewdness to bear on the religious enigma in the modern world, a world of the TV screen and consumerism ruled by a tele-presence without spatial depth. Within these paintings veils have been lifted and again drawn, metaphorically as well as literally. Cryptic utterances have been decrypted and deriddled in great wastelands of intimidation and incomprehension.

Anoma has derived much pleasure from these works in their holistic entity: from the initial travel experience and from the memories recalled, to the final translation into paint. Being metaphysical, analytical and physically engaging are ways of energizing one’s life. This is the result of the silences and the pauses in the business of every day living in a driven society. But with the gift of that extra quality of imagination she has been able to add insights that make these paintings significant for our times. They are like sermons in stone and prayers in the desert landscapes in central Asia, or poems. They make direct appeals to the viewer to enter into them. The likes of Dante understood this, which is why he recast Thomas Aquinas’s Christian theology and pre-Christian mythology, as a piece of autobiography. Anoma too is in this tradition. She has bridged them, coupled them into a worldview; built a temple to all religions, a chapel as it were in the temple of the muses. It is her testament to the ennobling quality of Art and her chosen form of meditation. The overwhelming impression after seeing her work was an exhilarating one.

She opens a seam of inspiration that changes the way we look at art and the past and leads the way to the individual and the age of autobiography. In many ways her art looks like an enigma, albeit one deliberately created as part of a conscious strategy whereby concealment and a possibility of equivocal readings are evidently as important to her as technicality and motif. These works are for multiple interpretations rather than a single definitive reading. They have what may be called a “first person ontology,” that is, they exist only from the point of view of some agent or person - whether it is the artist herself or the individual viewer. Their existence is entirely dependant on being experienced by a subject in the free flights of their imagination. It is the artist’s “magical realism”. In the painting Avadiya there is the depiction of time as well as ideas of spiritual and sensual awakenings. In this small scale work the artist has focused on the image by bringing into play ideas of perspective and light. The image is illuminated against an amber glow in a recess of a geological formation where time past, present and future seem to merge into eternity.

Anoma’s principal assertion in these works is that a continuing dialogue is necessary. The past is a destination that cannot be bypassed. It protects the distinctiveness of cultures that underlie the unity of people. This in turn will lead to the recognition of diversity and thus open the minds of people. Anoma, as an artist, is a synaptic phenomenon, a junction between cultures and a sort of conjugal angel and Morpha Eugenia. To her it is axiomatic that we cannot do without the past. We need the past and we need what is foreign, and painting, like translation, very often brings the two together. There is no estrangement of ourselves. In these paintings she sews together a multitude of disparate elements, cultural, religious, social and archeological, and puts her name to the resulting patchwork. The intertwining of reflection and painting leads her to use the monuments she has chosen to vividly enlarge the human community by gathering fragments and ordering reality in ways that make it new and providing access to the spiritual assets of two once again resurgent world religions through Art.