Beginnings

Laki Senanayake was born in 1937, the seventh of the eight children of Reginald and Florence Senanayake. Both his parents were active in left-wing politics and campaigned for workers’ rights. Reginald was a planter and a founder member of the Marxist Lanka Sama Samajist Party (LSSP). In 1942 he was imprisoned by the British for his political activities and died soon after his release in 1946.

Left with eight children, Florence Senanayake stepped into her husband’s shoes, taking over the management of a coconut estate near Chilaw.In 1947 she became Sri Lanka’s first woman member of parliament. Laki received his only formal education at Colombo’s Royal College where, by his own admission, he was regularly ‘in absentia’. Something of a free spirit, he was not academically minded and quit school early. As well as drawing unceasingly, he became obsessed with powerful motor-bikes and loved swimming and high diving. His first design project was to construct a diving board at the Otters’ Swimming Club in Colombo.

He briefly attended the Melbourne Art School where he encountered the teacher Cora Abraham and the artist Richard Gabriel. Gabriel had been a founder member of the ‘43 Group and introduced him to the work of other ‘43 Group members, notably George Keyt and George Claessen, and provided him with a basic technical foundation. However, Laki was largely self-taught and quickly became a superb draughtsman and colourist and the master of a variety of media, soon graduating to become a teacher himself.

His mother, a strong figure, poured scorn on his ambition to become a painter, and counselled him to become an architect: so he would earn a better living and would be more useful to society.  But there was no school of architecture in Ceylon and foreign study was too expensive. Laki was essentially ‘made in Sri Lanka’. Although he worked for a brief while in India and would later visit his daughter in the States, unlike many of his contemporaries, he didn’t study abroad and he spent little time in Europe.

In 1956 Laki joined architects Billimoria and de Silva as a draughtsman but he was eventually sacked for organising a trade union and campaigning for better pay and conditions. In 1958 he moved to Edwards Reid and Begg (E.R.& B.) a former British practice that was now headed by a Parsee architect called Jimmy Nilgiria along with his newly acquired partners Valentine Gunasekara and Geoffrey Bawa. Nilgiriya now took a back seat while Gunasekara and Bawa worked separately on their own projects with their own assistants. Bawa’s team included a young Danish architect called Ulrik Plesner who had spent the previous year working with Minnette de Silva in Kandy.

Having worked initially with Gunasekara, Laki claimed to have been ‘shanghaied’ by Bawa and henceforward worked closely with Bawa and Plesner. During the next couple of years, no doubt with the encouragement of Plesner and acquiescence of Bawa, he developed the characteristic office drawing style which would later feature in Bawa’s ‘White Book’ and come to be imitated across Asia. The key project in this process was the house that Bawa designed for the batik artist Ena de Silva. This represented Bawa’s first attempt to develop a hybrid of the traditional and the contemporary and took the form of an open-planned courtyard house. Laki’s drawing of the house’s crosssection was an attempt to describe how it would appear and feel to those who occupied it. Using a traditional ink pen that produced lines of varying thickness, he celebrated the flow of space between inside and outside, between building and landscape, and drew every tree and plant accurately. This phenomenological approach represented a radical departure from current conventions of architectural drawing which used more abstract representation. 

David Robson

Friends & Influence

Through Geoffrey Bawa, Laki was introduced to a circle of like-minded individuals that included Geoffrey’s brother Bevis, Australian artist Donald Friend, fabric designer Barbara Sansoni and batik artist Ena de Silva, and seems to have drawn on all of them in different ways for inspiration and encouragement.

In 1957 Donald Friend had taken up an invitation from Bevis to visit his garden at Brief and stayed for five years. During this time, he explored every corner of the island, visiting the ruins of the ancient cities, recording Medieval temple wall paintings and filling voluminous sketch books and diaries with vignettes of the everyday. The culmination of all of this was the series of murals depicting the richness of Ceylon life that he made for various commercial clients. Whilst at Brief, he helped Bevis Bawa to improve his garden and, encouraged by the local Alcan representative, he embarked on a series of sculptures using aluminium which he exhibited in Colombo in 1962. Friend exerted a big influence on Laki and gifted him his set of paints when he quit Ceylon in 1963.

During the early 1960s, Barbara Sansoni joined forces with Ulrik Plesner to identify and record surviving traditional buildings from Sri Lanka’s Medieval and Colonial Periods and recruited Laki Senanayake and his colleague Ismeth Raheem to help them. Sansoni identified the buildings and Plesner developed the methodology for recording them, but Laki and Ismeth produced the final drawings. Indeed, it was Laki who tutored Sansoni and helped her develop her own inimitable way of drawing. The drawings were later organised for publication by C. Anjalendran while Sansoni’s husband Ronald Lewcock prepared an accompanying text and a book finally appeared in 1998. Sadly many of the buildings that were featured in the book had disappeared by the time it was published.

During his time at E.R.& B., Laki was involved with a number of key projects as a principal assistant and draughtsman. These included A.S.H de Silva House in Galle (1960), the Nazareth Chapel in Bandarawela (1962), the Pin Fernando and Raffel Houses (1963) and the Montessori school at St. Bridget’s Convent (1964).  

Laki & Sculptures 

In 1965, tiring of the regime of an architects’ office, Laki quit E.R.& B. to join Ena de Silva’s batik studio and worked alongside her son Anil, helping to create many of their designs, including those for the ceiling of Bentota Beach Hotel in Bentota. But he had become Bawa’s favorite artist and he continued to work as a freelance for E.R.&B., filling empty niches with sculptures and covering blank walls with murals and paintings.  He created the majestic peacock that presides over the dining room of the Bentota Beach Hotel, the giant Bo Leaf sculpture for the Osaka World Fair (1970), the now faded mural that graces the loggia next to the Ha-Ha at Lunuganga (1970), the great ‘doublepalm’ chandelier which hangs above the main chamber of the Kotte Parliament (1982) and the giant owl that swoops over the main staircase in the Kandalama Hotel.  Working with a team of assistants, he even created one-off murals in every one of the hundred-and-twenty bedrooms of the Neptune Hotel.

Laki was a regular visitor to Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga garden and in 1960 drew the first of a series of detailed plans that would record the evolution of the garden at ten yearly intervals. Later, at Bawa’s behest he produced a mural depicting a classical battle scene along the wall of the loggia on the far side of the Ha Ha. His sketches appear regularly in the Lunuganga visitor book and one of his entries reports his sighting of more that forty species of birds in a single day. In 1990 Bawa’s friend Christoph Bon joined with a young Dominic Sansoni to produce a haunting book of photographs of the garden which Laki amplified with a series of carefully crafted drawings.

C.Anjaledran

He maintained that he was bullied into making sculpture by Geoffrey Bawa who simply wanted objects to enhance his architecture. But he was doubtlessly also inspired by Donald Friend’s experiments with aluminium. His animal sculptures were intended for architectural or garden settings and were made with obvious commercial intent. But they were nonethe-worse for that. His major sculptural commissions include the astonishing balustrade of the great circular staircase in Bawa’s Lighthouse Hotel in Galle which depicts a battle between the Sinhalese and the invading Portuguese and the screen made up of fantastical animals that acts as a room divider in the estate bungalow overlooking Weligama Bay that architect Anjalendran built for Miles Young.  Inspired by Nash’s chandeliers in the Brighton Pavilion, he also created the great palm chandelier that hangs in the Sri Lanka Parliament at Kotte, and hidden away off the old road to Negombo he made the memorial to the assassinated politician Vijaya Kumaratunga.

Designing Banknotes

At the end of the 1970s, Laki was commissioned to design a new set of banknotes for Sri Lanka. These featured careful drawings of Sri Lankan fauna presented against a background of appropriate flora. Each note had a landscape format image on one side and portrait on the other. The notes were given an international award by the Paris Bourse and for a time an enlargement of the Rs 10 note was used to decorate one of the Paris Metro stations. For a couple of years Sri Lanka could claim to have the most beautiful bank-notes in the world!

Later in Life

Over the years Laki functioned variously as a market gardener, a landscape designer, an architect, a poet, an illustrator and a decorator. But it was as an artist and sculptor that he excelled. Laki continued to draw and paint throughout his life: sometimes with serious intent, often simply for his own amusement; sometimes in abstract fashion, sometimes with painstaking realism. He used a variety of media and even experimented with a tablet to produce digital paintings. He painted for pleasure – his own pleasure and the pleasure of those who enjoyed his work. And he celebrated beauty, especially the beauty of the natural world. His work as an artist included painstakingly accurate botanic drawings, abstract paintings and sculptures, designs for currency notes, landscape paintings, erotic drawings and architectural installations. However, his versatility diminished him in the eyes of the cognoscenti who regarded him as being too versatile, too clever by half: he was dismissed as a mere entertainer or damned with the old epithet: ‘Jack-of-alltrades’. In 2009 Senake Bandaranayake and Albert Dharmasiri omitted any mention of him in their comprehensive survey of 20th Century Sri Lankan art.

Although in failing health, Laki continued to paint and sculpt and plan gardens well into his eighties, and he continued to entertain his friends like some latter-day Peter Pan, regaling them with his wit, entrancing them with his flute playing and beguiling them with his pictures. 

Serious artists are expected to focus on a tight fistful of themes and operate within a limited range of media. They should struggle, grapple with inner demons, address the big societal issues. For Laki, however, art was not a struggle – it was a source of delight.  Like his near contemporary, David Hockney, Laki enjoyed simply making and creating; he enjoyed exercising his considerable talents and experimenting with a variety of themes and different media. He enjoyed giving pleasure to others and he celebrated beauty – especially the beauty of the natural world.

Laki Senanayake deserves to be recognized as one of the most significant Sri Lankan artists of his generation, someone who had a profound effect on the way that Sri Lankan view themselves and the world around them. Sadly, there is nowhere in Colombo where the public can see a comprehensive collection of Laki’s work. Nor indeed can they see more than snippets of the work of other pioneers such as George Keyt, Justin Deranyagala, Lionel Wendt or Tissa Ranasinghe. Sri Lanka desperately needs a national gallery where the work of these pioneers can be on permanent display for all to see.