FAQ

 Are your paintings Sri Lankan art?  

I do not consider that to be the case. My friends, I consider myself to be as Scottish as I am Sri Lankan, living my life in this cold yet warm welcoming country. I capture global faces, Scottish places. Sri Lankan references may be there in my work, perhaps, but if they are, I do not see them. As much as I love the rich and beautiful land of my birth, hers is not the tale I am trying to tell in my work. Possibly at some point in days that have yet to pass, but not just yet.

 Are you ever tempted to paint a portrait in natural colours?  

No. To me, that would be like taking the most beautiful song in the world and mumbling the lyrics. The camera can capture more perfectly the literal colours of the subject, so it is of little interest to me to reproduce a second rate copy of the original. What I seek to capture in my work are the colours that play underneath the skin, the underlying story that needs no words for its tale to be told. A story which lives on many different levels.  

 What inspires you in your work?  

Natural beauty, unusual convention-defying beauty. Light and shade. A head at an unusual angle. Whirlpool eyes that pull you down into their dark recesses. Faces that can speak without the need for words. Or it can be a landscape. Stunning dappled trees in the half light of a summer forest, or glinting winter snow blanketing branch and winter soil with a glacial, silencing, uniform beauty. The picture can sometimes be on the Web, or it can be a frozen frame on a TV screen, or it can be something captured during our many walks around Linlithgow and the uniquely beautiful, uniquely Scottish countryside of this land. The common factor is the indefinable moment when, suddenly, I hear the story of something I am looking at.

How long do your paintings take?

They take their own time. I am an artist, a teller of tales, a singer of light and colour. I do not rush to create, to finish, to produce. I add layer to layer, shade to light, until what emerges on the canvas is the image and the story the lens of my mind's eye had in mind all along. It is not complete until it captures all it has to, for only then has the artist achieved their task. At some stage, I arrive at a point when I know that the evolution is complete, that adding more would take something away. (For those that like a more concrete answer, the typical timescale is between a week and a month).

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