Arts

Painting the unpaintable...

By Risidra Mendis 

Some of his paintings are not what you and I would want to see hanging in our houses or offices. However, a look at some of these paintings give an insight to the cruel, corrupt and unpleasant society we are forced to live in.

For S. H. Sarath, the well-known artist, there is no limit to the thoughts and ideas that flow through his mind. Sarath differs from other artists, in that he paints without restriction. Painting is now a part of Sarath's life.

An artist with unusual flair, creativity and talent would be the best way to describe Sarath, who has in his own way made people aware of the complicated lives they lead.

Speaking to The Sunday Leader Sarath says that people are yet to understand the vicious life cycle they live in. "Through my paintings I try as much as possible to give out special messages to the public. Some of my paintings are depressing but I think it is important to make people understand the reality of life," says Sarath.

His paintings also include human figures, animals, sceneries, nature and line drawings. Selected collections of Sarath's paintings can be seen at the State Collection of the President of Sri Lanka, the National Art Gallery Colombo, Trans Asia Hotel Colombo, Commercial Bank Head Office, Education Ministry, Koggala Beach Hotel, Tissara Beach Hotel, National Library Services Board Colombo, ANZ Bank in Norwood, Adelaide and South Australia, West Pack Bank Head Office Adelaide, South Australia, Calusa University of South Australia, Napean University of Western Sydney, Ecka Art Gallery Yugoslavia, Aud Slingnes Gallery Stavanger Norway and the Amara Gallery Stavanger, Norway.

Among his selected International exhibitions are those held at the Oxfam Exhibition, Glasclow and London UK and in the SAARC countries National Gallery of Modern Art New Delhi and Trivandrum India in 1992. The Oxfam Exhibitions, Smith Galleries, London, UK in 1993, Asian Watercolours 95 Bangkok in 1995 and the sixth Triennial Mondiale, France in 2003.

Sarath has held many solo exhibitions that include the Foyer Gallery Ottawa, Canada 2000, The Alliance Francaise in 2002, The Artist Gallery in 2003 and The Harold Peiris Gallery Colombo in 2004.

Sarath's experiences include work at the Government College of Fine Arts Colombo from 1968 to 1973, UNESCO Fellowship, Silpakorn University, Bangkok from 1979 to 1980, vice president of the Ceylon Society of Arts 1981 to 1983, Member of the Arts Panel, Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Art Council Sri Lanka 1983 to 1994, Art Consultant 1985 to 1987, Ecka Art Colony Programme Yugoslavia 1985 and Project Officer (Art), Ministry of Education and Higher Education Sri Lanka 1985 to1994.

In 1993 Sarath was an invitee from the Family. Through Children's Eyes, International Museum of Children's Art Oslo Norway and was connected to the Visual Arts University of South Australia from 1995 to 1996.

Sarath's latest exhibition will be held at the Felix Gallery Colombo 7, from March 5-27 from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

A lady Archer

By Kumudu Amarasingham 

Isabel Archer is a lady. And by  that token, a lady is a very free spirit; charming, virtuous, independent, with a beauty and radiance that emanates from the inside and spreads through her being. She is also a personality. Intelligent, presumptuous, probably brilliant, rather impulsive. A charming young woman "affronting her destiny" as Henry James puts it.

The Portrait Of A Lady, an all-time favourite and the novel closest to my heart, is however more than a sketch of Isabel Archer. It is, among a host of other things, a study of a strong, free, brave, righteous and proud head, within the body, and equipped with the heart, of a woman. The heart please note, of a woman. A fatal combination in a brutal world, then - and now. Isabel's only 'fault' is her pride - an apparently undesirable quality especially in a female.

Indeed it was just a couple of years ago that a fellow journalist at a media event actually advised me, and I quote, "A woman should not have any pride. It is not right. Pride is totally a man's domain."

Certainly, pride in the form of arrogance is low and base and, in that sense nobody's domain. But there is a different kind of pride surely. Not of the superficial variety that looks down at the world, but rather the pride of the noble. The pride of a pure heart and a clear conscience. The pride of a knowing, deep down inside, no matter what the world says or thinks, that one is refined, cultured, gracious, generous, decent. And because of these qualities, believing that one deserves the very best - especially in a partner. For should not the soul-mate of such a person posses a similarly deep and clear soul?

That at any rate is how Isabel Archer thinks. It leads her to reject a lord and an industrial magnate, both of whom are passionately in love with her, only to accept a man, a veritable nobody compared with her other illustrious suitors - a man whom she believes possesses the most beautiful mind in Europe. A belief that is eventually to prove shockingly and disastrously wrong.

The story is simple. A poor American girl who values her independence and does not look to a man to "furnish her with a destiny" is brought to England by her rich aunt. She is an instant success; liked by everyone, loved by many. Her uncle upon his death bequeaths a large sum of money to her, leaving her an heiress. Having rejected what are technically termed 'great' offers (of marriage), she falls for the biggest, if cleverest and superficially most tasteful, fortune hunter and egotist.

To do justice to James' sense of fairplay - Isabel is indeed too sure of herself - and that leads to her fall. Yet, as her cousin and ardent admirer remarks "I don't believe that such a generous mistake as yours can hurt you for more than a little." It is probably to emphasise the impassiveness of Ralph's short life as an invalid that such a statement is made by a man as exceptional and clever as him, for surely it is the most generous mistakes we make that we pay the hardest and longest for?

Isabel Archer is the kind of woman who truly should have married that knight or warrior prince - that is a prince or knight not necessarily by birth or merely in name - but in spirit.

The Kafka project

Franz Kafka, the son of Julie L”wy and Hermann Kafka, a  merchant, was born into a middle-class Jewish family. After two brothers died in infancy, he became the oldest child, remaining forever conscious of his role as older brother; Ottla, the youngest of his three sisters, became the family member closest to him.

Kafka strongly identified with his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, eccentricity, melancholy disposition, and delicate physical and mental constitution. He was not, however, particularly close to his mother, a simple woman devoted to her children. Subservient to her overwhelming, ill-tempered husband and his exacting business, she shared with her spouse a lack of comprehension of their son's unprofitable and possibly unhealthy dedication to the literary "recording of (his)...dreamlike inner life."

The figure of Kafka's father overshadowed Kafka's work as well as his existence; the figure is, in fact, one of his most impressive creations. For, in his imagination, this coarse, practical and domineering shopkeeper and patriarch, who worshiped nothing but material success and social advancement, belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome, admirable, but repulsive tyrant.

Autobiography

In Kafka's most important attempt at autobiography, Brief An Den Vater (written 1919; Letter To Father), a letter that never reached the addressee, Kafka attributed his failure to live - to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage and fatherhood - as well as his escape into literature, to the prohibitive father figure, which instilled in him the sense of his own impotence.

He felt his will had been broken by his father. The conflict with the father is reflected directly in Kafka's story Das Urteil (1916; The Judgment). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka's novels, which portray in lucid, deceptively simple prose a man's desperate struggle with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The Trial) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval (as in The Castle).

Yet the roots of Kafka's anxiety and despair go deeper than his relationship to his father and family, with whom he chose to live in close and cramped proximity for the major part of his adult life. The source of Kafka's despair lies in a sense of ultimate isolation from true communion with all human beings - the friends he cherished, the women he loved, the job he detested, the society he lived in - and with God, or, as he put it, with true indestructible being.

Bright student

The son of a would-be assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community, Kafka was German both in language and culture. He was a timid, guilt-ridden, and obedient child who did well in elementary school and in the Altst„dter Staatsgymnasium, an exacting high school for the academic elite. He was respected and liked by his teachers.

Inwardly, however, he rebelled against the authoritarian institution and the dehumanised humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning and classical languages. Kafka's opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists; attended meetings of the Czech Anarchists (before World War I); and, in his later years, showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialised Zionism.

Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but as a modern intellectual he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka's lifelong personal unhappiness. Kafka did, however, become friendly with some German-Jewish intellectuals and literati in Prague, and in 1902 he met Max Brod; this minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka's friends, and eventually he emerged as the promoter, saviour, and interpreter of Kafka's writings and as his most influential biographer.

Writing part time

The two men became acquainted while Kafka was indifferently studying law at the University of Prague. He received his doctorate in 1906, and in 1907 he took up regular employment with an insurance company. The long hours and exacting requirements of the Assicurazioni Generali, however, did not permit Kafka to devote himself to writing. In 1908 he found in Prague a job in the seminationalised Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire (with a pension) in 1922, about two years before he died. In his job he was considered tireless and ambitious; he soon became the right hand of his boss, and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him.

In fact, generally speaking, Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and humorous individual, but he found his routine office job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him (for his nights were frequently consumed in writing) to be excruciating torture, and his deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed.

The conflicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. Inhibition painfully disturbed his relations with Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged before their final rupture in 1917. Later his love for Milena Jesensk  Pollak was also thwarted. His health was poor and office work exhausted him. In 1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and from then onward he spent frequent periods in sanatoriums.

In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to escape from his paternal family and devote himself to writing. In Berlin he found new hope in the companionship of a young Jewish socialist, Dora Dymant, but his stay was cut short by a decisive deterioration of his health during the winter of 1924. After a brief final stay in Prague, where Dora Dymant joined him, he died in a clinic near Vienna.