Against the Storms Print

Wasantha Ranjan combines Sri Lankan life and phenomena to produce a unique style that is faithful to his roots. This style is executed with such beauty that radiates a profound feeling among all Sri Lankans. Wasantha's paintings are drenched with the richness and picturesque images of local beauty and its culture. The artist represents Sri Lanka through a large kaleidoscope that appreciates the vibrant beauty of the sunny island. Through his paintings he has developed a close kinship with natural phenomena, and visualizes it beautifully and expressively. Working with acrylics, oil paints, pastels, pencils and photography, Wasantha employs a very limited color palette with a variety of colors that compliment and brighten his paintings to capture the essence of his world. He adds vibrancy to mundane Sri Lankan phenomena and enhances them with his sharp eye for manipulating proportion and scale, and abstracting it. Wasantha's paintings began as a hobby when he was a child, and throughout the years he has perfected his skills with the knowledge and learning experiences as a professional artist. The meticulousness of his paintings adds a sense of reality to such divine phenomena to connotate nature's vibrancy and timelessness. To Wasantha, art is all about creating new experiences. He firmly believes that it is a subject interpreted in various ways. The fluidity of the brush-strokes in his landscape paintings and portraits, leave an emotional impression that is truly heartwarming. His inner impulses are splashed across the canvas in an improvisatory manner, while simple compositions with large areas of color intend to produce a contemplative and a meditational response in the viewer. Wasantha Ranjan is a self-taught and explorative artist who gathers inspiration from exploring a variety of artists, styles and techniques. His artistic approach intertwines utopic expectations and reality through his unnerving juxtapositions. Inspired by the great Sri Lankan artist Jayasiri Semage he has trained his imagination to also root for an abstract aspect of everyday life and people. He also says that George Keyt's cubistic approach and rich colors have encouraged the stylization and distortion of real-life phenomena into geometric forms in his abstract paintings. Some of Wasantha's paintings do not copy nature precisely, but is modelled through abstract techniques of perspective, space and contrasting vantage points.