Chandrajeewa doesn’t sculpt. He relaxes, takes plaster of Paris and plays around with it. In forty minutes, he will have a face, warts smirk, smiles and all, which bears his inimitable stamp. It will be an understatement to call his talent prodigious. It’s something totally out of his world. When Christopher Ondaatje the tycoon was in Sri Lanka, he bet Chandrajeewa that it will be impossible to do an exact likeness of his face in a one-hour sitting. No way, Chandrajeewa smiled, and set up his apparatus. He too only 25 minutes...

It’s the same treatment that Chandrajeewa gives for any of his subjects. The man has done celebrity sculptures, ranging from artists to poets to scientists, some of his best work being done in a one-year period in 1990 when he did one hundred heads which will shortly be exhibited in Colombo in a Chandrajeewa solo.

Sculpture is three dimensional art, so it has to be accurate from all frames of reference and all perspectives. Good sculpture necessarily requires talent, and there is no going behind it. Born in Nuwara Eliya, Chandrajeewa was never an inheritor to the Dankotuwa tradition of clay work or pottery. This talent certainly was not running in the family.

His first inspiration was Lev Karbel, the man who made the stern looking Bandaranaike memorial statue on Galle Face. That’s leaving aside his guru, Tissa Ranasinghe, Sri Lanka’s best known sculptor of a different age, who did most of the statues in the old parliament compound. After he talked to Karbel Chandrajeewa experimented. He took about ten days to be as good as the master.

Chandrajeewa’s major work include the 15-foot high memorial to the unknown soldier, now installed at the Panagoda army camp. But, the sculptor’s own favourite work include the bronze head of the late Dr Colvin R De Silva in the Law Library Colombo Sri Lanka, the 4 foot high bust of the late C.W.W Kannangara at the National Institute of Education, Maharagama, and the 12-foot high streetscape statue of the Late Mr. Munidasa Kumaratunge, Main Road, Matara.

Sarath talks of Michelangelo and Cellini as if he met them in the canteen the day before; he seems to relates to them across the chasm of time in terms of artistic sensibilities. “They were eccentrics during their day and age, “ he says, adding that “they were the artist, not the technicians.” Sarath hopes to involve to the point where he can leave the technical aspects entirely to the others, when he will have possess unlimited creative freedom in his hands.

What one may have forgotten, as a result, is that Chandrajeewa has enjoyed being a potter, too. The pots once used in the daily flow of local life.

Chandrajeewa has a point to make by returning to history. According to him, the idiom of Lankan Potters has a flavour very much of its own. He adds, one will never find the shape of pots made here elsewhere; it is a fact of culture: to each people their own pots. A book on pottery provides the finishing touches to this theory.

References: "The Magic In His Genius" - Rajpal Abeyanayake
"Chandrajeewa's timely tonic" - A M Macan Markar
"The hands of the Potter" - Charith Pelpola