The Sri Lankan Leopard is a breathtakingly beautiful creature. Its majestic demeanour has invited wildlife photographers worldwide to spend weeks concealed in the wilderness with only a slight hope of sighting them at their best angle. Indika Wijewardana is not an exception to this fandom, but he prefers to celebrate his ardent fondness for the big cat by showcasing it on a series of large scale pencil drawings.
Indika’s reputation as a serious artist started growing with his leopard drawings that he started a few years ago. Later he felt the need to execute the same work on a wider framework and provide a more grandiose viewing experience to his audience. Having exhibited in Dubai he was able to experiment with this thought and was successful. The response was overwhelming. He knew then that transferring his idea to Sri Lanka would be as effective as pencil sketches of this capacity was not commonly sighted.
Another reason why he favours a grander rendition is that small drawings do not offer the same detailed viewing experience. In terms of quantity, the details on his current pieces are so luxuriously vivid, that it is effortlessly able to capture the unwavered visual attention of its observers. Indika has been exhibiting in public since 2012. He had his first solo exhibition in Colombo in 2013. For the next six years Indika has been dabbling in the international art scene, mainly in Dubai, exploring his technique and fine tuning it.
Pacifying his need for perfection, he reveals that his creative process is quite fascinatingly arduous. Starting with the canvasses that each takes a week to prepare “I make the canvas on paper finish” and depending on his visualisation, it takes him between a month or three to finish a single drawing. He wears down his pencil nibs tirelessly until his leopards seem like they are live participants in a black and white movie. In fact, when he was exhibiting in Dubai his work appeared to seem so lifelike to onlookers that they at first dismissed it to be a black and white photo.
Indika aspires to establish a distinctive style as world renowned artists such as, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have done before him. Despite his growing popularity, Indika remains humble. He says simply, “My supporters are my inspiration. I wouldn’t be where I am right now, if it weren’t for them”.
Besides the internal struggles, Indika endures as an artist he also had other resistances to face. “When I was looking to exhibit in Dubai, I approached many galleries. Most of them didn’t care to even look at my work because all they saw was an Asian artist. I didn’t give up and managed to participate in a few events and then people started to discover me. It was then that I got to participate in my first international art show, The Pullman Art Exhibition.” The international exposure he has received has been crucial to his progress as an artist. “My art has travelled to at least 20 to 30 countries” he explained. It has been another indication that as an artist he is becoming more and more receptive. Furthermore, it had been noted by connoisseurs that Indika’s eye for alignment is remarkable.
To him art and life are inseparable, “Art is the last thing you buy, but it is the first thing you notice in a home”.
Featuring a number of large scale sketches Whiskers an artist’s perspective of wildlife will be held at the Modigliani Art Gallery on Stratford Avenue from August 25 to 29 between 10 a.m – 8. p.m .