Stephen Prins
Daily, two crows join us as we sip our morning tea. One perches on the back of a facing chair, the other on the arm of the chair. They gaze at tea-drinker and teacup, reminding us they have come for their morning milk. The shallow plate filled with milk is placed in the garden, on a slab of cement paving. The birds tilt the plate with their beaks, tip the milk over, bend their heads to the ground and sip the spilled milk through the side of their beaks. The milk spreads out in broad white tributaries, flowing north, west, east. After the crows are gone, the remaining milk dries in the sun, leaving streaky overlapping dark stains that remind us of the art of Druvinka, the Sri Lankan artist who lives at the foot of the Himalayas.
We must be the only non-collectors to be daily reminded of the work of Druvinka, as we step over the freshly poured art that takes shape in our garden each day of the week.
Druvinka’s canvases are stained with the milk and body fluids of the universe. They flow into view from cosmic corners and streak the heavens. A Druvinka painting is usually a dark proposition. Her view of the world is heavily overcast. But in the midst of the cosmic gloom light occasionally breaks through.
This surprise entrance, or breakthrough, of colour was welcomed by Druvinka collectors at the artist’s last Colombo exhibition, last year. Up to then her work had been uniformly grey or ashen – solemn and unsmiling. This time there was a glimmer of light. Yellow and red had leaked into view, as if a sun were rising galaxies away, or a cosmic egg yolk had broken.
Druvinka’s art is about fecundity, the fertilizing of the universal egg, the spilling of seed across Time and Space. Approaching Druvinka canvases is like entering the world’s belly, containing all manner of symbolic forms – phallic, mammary, uterine.
A year ago, the artist, who descends on Colombo from time to time to show and sell her art, explained her painting technique. The first stage is literally an “outpouring” – not from heart or head, but possibly from the subconscious. Paint is poured onto a canvas stretched on a wooden frame and left flat on the floor. The liquids flow and spread out. Once the paint has settled and dried into its final form, the artist starts stage two, the conscious part. In threads of fine ink, traced among heavenly shadows, the artist reveals a personal mythology that is steeped in ancient Indian-Hindu belief. Forms and figures suggest deities, shadows bodying forth Vishnu, Siva, Kali and Ganesh. Or the inked threads may writhe and gather into an image of impregnation and creation. “Pregnant with meaning” may be an art-lit talk cliché but it is appropriate for Druvinka’s work, which is profoundly female and maternal.
Meeting Druvinka is an experience. She is exquisitely feminine, with the grace and warmth of the idealised Asian-Oriental female. She is all Woman. She is Mother and Sister. When she talks, she is Mother Teacher or Sister Confidante. Her eyes film over as she tells the story of her art as a consuming spiritual quest, or as a difficult but joyous begetting of beauty. When you look at her sprawling canvases, you think: here is a woman who is ready to give birth over and over for the sake of sharing her unexplainable mystic message. Her paintings are prodigious offspring, each different but also alike, like non-identical twins and triplets. The work shown last year had all these elements of being both of one substance but also different.
Many of the images she showed on the last occasion were bi-valved organisms: you could draw a line down the middle, like a spine, and separate the painting into two almost equal halves, like a Rorschach inkblot.
The artist said she had no strategy when working on these paintings.