How to preserve canvass of art and culture

What if someone told us that life is just a canvass and that we were the paint brush? Some of us have high quality brushes and paints – such as inherited wealth or socially prestigious families. However, like brushes or paints, they can fade away but the main frame of the art that we create for our lives will live on.

We are today patching up the Sigiriya damsels because the paints are worn off but the main idea and image of this communication of a time and era remains for posterity.

We are all artists. We paint a canvas called our lives. The country is but an art gallery. Each action is but a brush stroke. If we keep our homes clean and clutter free we are communicating that we have created a living manifestation of what our minds are like. A nation with garbage cleanly sorted out and recycled has created a living portrait that communicates respect to others, respect of resources used, thriftiness of reusing and respect to the earth. Such a nation will have responsible citizens and their streets will be spotless. 

There was a senior surgeon who once told me that modern medical expertise – he was referring to surgery – is more of an art than a science.

Every human being, whether one takes into account the exterior or the interior is a work of art that needs to be perfected.

With each thought or action we are in the process of perfecting the individualistic canvas of our making. 

Art as we discussed some time back is not separate from the outer universe that encompasses trees, the earth, rivers and streams. The art of Africa, China and Japan for example are unique because it is developed synchronised with the unique natural world of those countries.

Sri Lanka’s indigenous medicine – Sinhala Wedakama had the entire prescriptions for different ailments composed in verse form and the streams that we had where the oru and paru travelled to and fro led to the creation of verses that sang of these sojourns. The farming traditions led to different kinds of verses. Art is a lung that collectively breathes the voice of creativity. Ancient paintings of Lanka would describe the above scenes aptly.

Art grows with us organically. It grows with what we think and what we believe. It cannot thrive in sterilised mortuaries. We talk today of preserving our cultural heritage not realising that preserving such a heritage comes only when each of us have returned with consciousness to our individual canvass and joined our outer world with our inner world.

This is how the culture of a nation survives time.

Note: The above is only a snippet of thought that seeks to serve as part of our preliminary introspection of the overall discourse on how to revive Sri Lanka’s cultural centres island-wide and make it relevant.