He was best known among the painters of his generation as an enthusiastic exponent of the principles and practices of contemporary European painting. His affection for Western art was due in large measure to his artistic training at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and Académie Julian, Paris. Daraniyagala has generally been credited with introducing Post-impressionism to Sri Lanka in the late 1920s. His early paintings, like those of the artists of the French school, show a marked penchant for the simplified significant form and a disregard for visual truth. Despite his obvious admiration for French artists, he was not satisfied simply to follow in their wake, but set himself the task of developing a personal idiom based on his European experience. As a draughtsman, he allowed his creative energy to flow unchecked from the fast moving pencil, pen and brush. In his drawings the originality of vision is fused with a high degree of technical skill. He favoured the use of thick layers of colour set down in bold, sweeping brushstrokes and marked impasto that created a heavily textured pictorial surface. His paintings have been noted for their expressionistic spirit. Daraniyagala was indeed considered a leader among Asian expressionists. He painted with great abandon and exerted much influence on his contemporaries, who recognized the liberating effect of his style.

G.S.Whittet, in his London commentary published in The Studio, April 1954 wrote:"The art of Picasso in the period of the 1930's is so essentially of non-European lineage that it comes as something of a surprise to find that a Ceylonese follower succeeds in extracting a great deal more of reality from the vision than the great Magalan himself. Maternity of 1947, for example, compared with the latest Picasso acqusition by the Tate Gallery Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge, contained an abrupt shock of contact with the facts of life which reduces the Spanish work to a voluptuous but withdrawn boudoir decoration. But Daraniyagala, while submitting occassionally to a foreign style of distortion, nevertheless speaks in the pure language of his own personality as in The Studio with its richness of colour".