All images on Druvinka Madawela Portfolio are copyrighted by Dominic Sansoni.
© Dominic Sansoni. All Rights Reserved.

In the majority of real artists’ cases i.e. those not employed as commercial artists, whose talents may be dictated to by the nature of commissions - it would go against the grain to be lumped into any camp. Apart from any other consideration, generalisations allow no licence for development or the privilege of evolving through a number of distinct styles. For a woman painter not to mind being portrayed as a ‘woman’s
painter’, then, is unusual.

All the more so in the case of Druvinka, a female artist whose inspiration for the present at least, is inextricably linked to that most male of symbols, the Siva Lingam. If you are unfamiliar with this traditional Indian image, it may be described delicately as the male member. My use of the adverb is deliberate in this case for as an icon it bears little relationship to pornography; rather it presents an admittedly graphic representation of virility. Crucially, in this instance, one that is equally related to fertility and fecundity. All are connected to the power the Lingam has exuded for thousands of years.

In terms of Druvinka’s personal philosophy it has little to do with religion per se but much to do with the spirituality she has found in India, and her own motherhood. Each of her two pregnancies marked a change of direction in her art, from abstraction to figurative work and back now to the abstract once again. Childbearing is a very public statement of a very private act and brings individual intensities to each mother, different every time. Small wonder the artistic temperament (I do not apply those words pejoratively here) can subsequently produce emotional reaction that demands an outlet.

In an inevitable period of introversion or at least introspection which every mother experiences during the creation of a new life, a kind of distillation occurs. The maelstrom that daily surrounds you is reduced down to those elements that send the strongest personal messages. Another sort of abstraction, it might be said, one that has led to art critics using descriptive adjectives such as ‘foetal’, ‘organic’ and ‘fluid’.

The birth of the artist’s first son coincided with revelations of the atrocities in Rwanda and heralded her intense preoccupation with imprisonment, of being boxed in; her work began to deal with being ‘caged’. It is hard to exclude at least some allusion to the state of womankind, caught up in all consuming mothering and experiencing frustration at its necessary limitations. At this stage in particular, her work was particularly suited to her technique, which involves what she describes as ‘angry’ overlaying.

Her canvases start with brightly coloured bases, subdued under layers of small sheets of her trademark bamboo paper, overlapped and interspersed with vigorous, paler washes. The resultant, often monotone pictures end up very simplified: externally calm, inwardly constrained a subtle portrayal of dichotomy. In conjunction with the phallic shapes repeated throughout her current phase of work in vital and tiny pieces akin to miniatures, this latest, all new exhibition includes huge canvases. In these the tempera technique is writ large, hundreds of lines described like marks of deliberation, adding to a three-dimensional effect.

Having studied in India as well as her homeland Sri Lanka, she and her young family are now settled there but for international excursions to exhibit. India has, she says, "opened her out" and the atmosphere "buoys her up". These subdued but sensuous passions are implicit in her work, which sells worldwide apparently it appeals a lot to the Dutch and to NGO staffs! She has exhibited in Paris, London and India as well as here, where she has also lectured and was a founder member of the Sapumal Printmaking Centre.

References : Contradictions on canvas by Cecilia McGuire