The Serpent, Sword and Shield

The Serpent, Sword & Shield is from my current series of paintings "Cultural Intersections". It has been exhibited in Toronto. It acknowledges the legacy of the Pattern & Decoration movement and its ideals, while expressing my unique vision rooted in my South Asian heritage as a Sri Lankan born immigrant to Canada and a Person of Colour.
These works can be described as “exotic” illusory landscapes hovering between representation and abstraction. Largely painted intuitively, and drawing on a variety of sources as reference, they are a mix of objects, nature imagery, patterning and ornamentation. Within the paintings I create narrative and tangential connections reflecting intersections and migrations of various cultural visual languages from South Asian to Middle Eastern to Western. Within this eclectic mix they become vehicles to express my concerns for the loss of nature, the echoes of colonialism, migration and transformation. Through re-interpreting and re-contextualizing these forms within my own unique style and content, this synthesis is a way of speaking to the “in-between space” of varied social and cultural realities that I inhabit. Finally I strive to make each work political, poetic and beautiful. The painting is 30" x 30" unframed and is 31 1/2" x 31 1/2" framed.