04/08/2025
Conservatory (2021 - Present)
By Arjuna Gunarathne
Ink & Acrylic Pigment Pen, Watercolour on Paper
Essay by Sanjay Dalugoda
Unlike the slow, breath-bound processes inherent to oil painting,
where pigment, oil, and time enact a sensuous meditation on temporality, both Ink and Acrylic
(whether in Pigment Pen form or Viscous Fluid) embody a very different modus operandi. Their
ontological constitution resists temporal unfolding: they dry swiftly, their chroma assertive, and
their facture immediate. What emerges from such materials is a quality of expressive directness:
the mark, once made, is irreversible. In this sense, the medium itself exerts an a priori force on
the image's ontology, permanence, certitude, and existential finality.
This quality lends itself to what one might term an écriture plastique. A plastic writing that is
confident, assertive, and assured, especially when articulated through gestural, rhythmic or
automatist mark-making. Arjuna’s works in Ink and Acrylic, particularly within the Conservatory
series, demonstrate this aesthetic modality. The quick-drying nature of the media prohibits
reworking in the traditional sense, thus forcing each mark to embody its full telos the moment it
is inscribed. The gesture becomes a rhythmic, temporal event, a decisive manifestation of
thought-as-form in space. Here, one finds echoes of Tachisme, Action Painting, and even
Affekt-Malerei, yet he is neither purely European nor American in lineage. It is born of his unique
Svabhāva, the essential inner nature of materials in intimate dialogue with memory, breath, and
perception.
Where staining is employed, especially in underlayers, the affect shifts dramatically. These
atmospheric veils, often achieved through diluted ink, form what could be called the Grundton,
the base tonality or ambient vibration of the image. This substratum, however, is not akin to the
cerebral blending or smudging seen in Arjuna’s Soft-Pastel work. Instead, these stains function
as patina affectiva, an affective patina that sets the emotive register of the scene. Take, for
instance, "The Idle Man" (2025) or "Lost Timath" (2024), where the gradated washes operate
almost like a visual drone or Tanpura, sustaining the emotional resonance upon which the
figural motifs rise.
Much has been misunderstood by ill-equipped critics who, failing to grasp form, facture, and
morphê, resort to derivative psychoanalytic readings. One such critic opined that Arjuna's
foliage symbolizes a nostalgic yearning for lost village life. This misreading, perhaps forgivable
by virtue of blissful ignorance, is in fact a projection, reminiscent of the flawed Verlust
Paradigma (the loss-paradigm) so often imposed on diasporic artists. Julian Bell responded
aptly: "To talk of ‘Displacement’ is to suggest that Places exist."¹ Arjuna’s foliage, though vegetal
in appearance, is neither tropical nor local. It is a synthetic expression of interior perception, not
ethnobotanical reference (thus, neither suited for their ill-dreamt theories of Diasporic
Dissonance). This is Ghettoisation at best. If one looks for lazy psycho-babble, it’s assured they
will quite easily find it.
While Arjuna was born in Matale, Central Sri Lanka, he grew up in the capital, Colombo, amidst
urbanity, steel, and rhythm. His preferred studio today is situated amidst the multicultural
Klangfarbenmelodie of Ponders End High Street, North London. Not some pastoral retreat in
Cornwall. This, in itself, reveals a conceptual fidelity to la ville moderne, where noise and
complexity are sublimated into visual harmony.
If-pray-their two-bit theories [rejected] from asylms may still yield some valuable observational
wisdom, they might identify connotations of yearning for English flora, once encountered in
some distant Yorkish grotto. His vegetal marks, then, are not indexical signs of indigenous flora
but rather gestures toward perceptual foliage. Perhaps recalling oak, beech, birch, or croton, not
because of direct observation, but because of sensorial osmosis. These are not motifs, but what
Deleuze might call Haecceities [singular events of becoming] individuated through their
Temporal & Spatial Resonance.²
Indeed, Julian Bell’s insight aligns with Heidegger’s phenomenology: Ort (place) is not
geometrical but experiential; Disclosed through Dasein’s attunement to Being. Arjuna's works
offer interior landscapes, visual phenomenologies of memory-space, shaped by embodied
recollection. Each mark arises from what Abhinavagupta termed Camatkāra: Aesthetic Wonder
born of the fusion of the viewer’s inner experience with the artist’s vision.³ This is crucial: the
image is not a depiction but a transmission.
In works such as "Where are you?" (2024) and "Where is Tushma?" (2024), the compositional
schema forms a rhythmos — a visible pulse — coalescing toward the lower register of the
standing figure, where Mark, memory, and meaning converge. Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual
Perception offers a compelling framework here: what we see as Balance (of [in] the eye) is a
dynamic equilibrium, a Gestalt created through perceptual tensions.⁴ These works achieve
visual consonance not by symmetry but by Gewichtung, a weighting of forms that creates a felt
sense of resolution.
The stained ground layers are not merely chromatic backdrops. They are mood-resonances:
Svarabhāvas, that provide the tonal aether through which the upper forms emerge. Building
from memory and embodied feeling, Arjuna draws upon a lifetime of sketchbook studies, life
drawing, and techne refined into phronesis: practical wisdom. The figure is not illustrated; it is
evoked. Each gestural line is a condensation of time, experience, and intentionality.
Thus, the permanence of the ink and acrylic medium - non-reworkable, lacking the plasticity of
oil or pastel - becomes a philosophical proposition. These marks do not merely record thought;
they instantiate it. They are not expressions of fleeting emotion but crystallisations of interior
eventfulness. Here, time unfolds vertically: in layers. And each layer is a palimpsest of memory,
emotion, and discovery, a fourth-dimensional unveiling.
"Family" (2024) perhaps best demonstrates Arjuna’s Gesamtkunstwerk, his total integration of
poetics, colour theory, figuration, and perspective. Its labyrinthine structure is reminiscent of
Escher’s paradoxical architectures, yet interwoven with sfumato transitions and chiaroscuro
depth, miniaturised to a Mughal intricacy. The gazes of the figures are deeply evocative of
Egyptian hieroglyphs, where even a millimetric shift of the iris imparts pathos, biography, lived
experience and interiority.
This is not merely pastiche. It is a meta-iconic language, resonant with Mayan ritual figuration
and Aztec ritual-painting abstraction. Their dance is not decorative but ceremonial, perhaps
even entelechial, where form reaches its fulfilment. As Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra instructs, the nine
rasas (sentiments of pleasure) emerge not from subject-matter, but from bhāva, the aesthetic
emotion internal to the Gesture.⁵ Arjuna’s figures emanate karuṇā (compassion), vīra (heroism),
and śānta (tranquillity) in a dynamic interplay.
In conversation with Arjuna, he shared that "Family" was conceived as a visual prayer, a
contemplation of familial impermanence, as his children approach adulthood. The painting is not
an illustration of sorrow but a vibrational field of felt temporality. These are chronotopes -
Bakhtinian time-spaces - expressed in Mark, hue, and rhythm. The vibrations that encircle the
figures are neither ornamental nor abstract; they are the ritournelles of time, encoded in form.
Indeed, his work is a unique confluence of spiritual meditative immediacy and Western plastic
rationalism. Focusing instead on the aesthetic logic through technical mastery, compositional
intelligence, and the embrace of medium-specific truth (media veritas), Arjuna has forged a new
language, a visual poetics of breath, gesture, and interiority.
His avant-garde vision and wisdomful skill, along with his disciplined innovation, were
recognised at the RI Royal Institute of Watercolour Painters UK’s Summer Show 2025, where
he won The John Purcell Paper Prize. This particular series is still ongoing.
¹ Bell, Julian. What is Painting? Representation and Modern Art. Thames & Hudson, 1999.
² Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
³ Abhinavagupta. Abhinavabhāratī, commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra. Trans. Gnoli, Raniero.
Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1968.
⁴ Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. University of
California Press, 1974.
⁵ Bharata. Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Manomohan Ghosh. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1950–1961.
