Casting Bronze – Playing with Fire:

Tissa Ranasinghe and Fine Art Pedagogy

By Dr. Laleen Jayamanne

Neville Weeraratne, the multi-talented painter and journalist, was a familiar name from the long-ago English theatre of Colombo I had begun to read about and attend as an undergraduate in the mid 1960s. Now I am registering with astonishment that he had lived here in Melbourne, Australia, from 1971-2018 and written a series of significant books on Lankan Modern art. It’s been said that, “If not for the comprehensive chronicles and record about the 43 Group painstakingly documented by Neville Weeraratne, much information would have been lost – a labour of love indeed”.

I came across a dazzling account of Tissa Ranasinghe’s process of sculpting by casting bronze, in Weeraratne’s 2013 book on this preeminent modern Lankan sculptor. It’s that insightful passage which made me write this, so as to begin to understand a little, the idea of traditions in bronze sculpture and a ‘metallurgical imagination’ which might link contemporary, modern and ancient practices of working with bronze, in Sri Lanka. My specific aim here is to understand Ranasinghe’s process of transmission of knowledge and craft skill as an educator within an art school. I am especially interested in his philosophy of pedagogy so powerfully delineated by Weeraratne, who would have been well schooled in Lankan Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist politics and the cultural revival after 1956, which he lived through.

time there. We learn that Weeraratne was one of the youngest members of the ‘43 Group having studsied with Richard Gabriel at St Joseph’s College, followed by an apprenticeship with Ivan Peries through whom he came to know Harry Pieris. It is also exhilarating to know, as a Sri Lankan-Australian, that Lankan art history has been chronicled from Australia which also nurtured the pioneering Lankan scholar/filmmaker Dharmasena Pathiraja, when he read for his doctorate here at Monash University on the three major Bengali filmmakers’ takes on Indian nationalism, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. His son, the brilliant young, ecologically oriented architect, Milinda Pathiraja, was educated at Melbourne University and still has ties with the architectural faculty. He is especially interested in innovative craft training on the building site. For example he has arranged bricklayers to be trained in new techniques even as they build his designs suited to local terrain and climate. The proudly egalitarian ethos of Australia I am sure, would have left an impression on the young Milinda, son of a radical artist. I myself wrote a doctorate on the ‘Positions of Women in the Lankan Cinema, 1947-1979)’ here in Sydney, within its prickly and exciting, radical feminist intellectual and film-cultural milieu in the 1970’s.

The Lankan historian Michael Roberts’ obituary of Weeraratne appears in his fascinating ‘Thuppahi’s blog’, which is a treasure trove of Lankan cultural history written, again, from Australia, after his retirement from the University of Adelaide. I remember a young and athletic looking Roberts in the late ‘60s, zipping through the Peradeniya campus on his scooter, cutting a striking figure as the son of a Jamaican father and a Burgher mother. Roberts provides a short biography of Weeraratne in his ‘Thuppahi’s Blog’ named after the derogatory term for Lankans of mixed ethnicity such as the Burghers. Roberts says jokingly that no one ever called him a ‘kabiriya’ during his

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In the following extended passage, Weeraratne describes vividly, with great acuity the difficult process of creating Bronze sculpture by smelting metal at high temperatures. The difficulty he says is both physical and emotional because the sculptor is working within a volatile field of matter and energy at tipping points. Importantly, we can see his ability to appreciate Ranasingha’s daring innovative spirit as a creative educator within a conservative art education institute.

“The smith, or founder, is a master of fire. It is with the fire that he controls the passage of matter from one state to another…  and is an art that should be practiced by one who is accustomed to the sweat and many discomforts which it brings…he who wishes to practice this art must not be of a weak nature, either from age or constitution, but must be young, strong and vigorous…. in addition this art holds the mind of the artificer in suspense and fear regarding its outcome and keeps his spirit disturbed and almost continuously anxious.” (p. 66)

“He not only directed the students but also contributed to the labor himself. Clearly he was well-accustomed to the sweat and discomfort of metal-crafting.” (p. 45).

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“Hovering in mid-air above the battlefield, the master called forth dread darkness over the Nagas and, comforting those who were distressed, he once again spread light abroad.” (p. 74)

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“Tissa, therefore, dares to show the Buddha in distress and wounded as in Mara Yuddha.” (p. 81)

“Whereupon a large number of students, some one hundred of them, decided to show their displeasure by boycotting their classes.” (p. 82).

Neville Weeraratne, The Sculpture of Tissa Ranasinghe (Colombo: The National Trust, Sri Lanka, 2013). SLACAAD 730.9254931WEE.

In Sharmini Pereira, P. Kirubalini, Searching for Discomfort, in “Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia”. Volume 1, Number 1, March 2017, pp. 187-201 (Article) Published by NUS Press Pte Ltd.

I am most grateful to Sharmini Pereira for this essay and the organisation she conceived and created, ‘Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design’, for making this invaluable educational material readily accessible to researchers.

After this astounding student protest against his approach in representing the Buddha in a Jataka tale, as all too human, as well as personal attacks on him based on the fact that his wife was English, Tissa Ranasingha resigned from the art school, having taught there for just two years from 1970 -72. Returning to Britain with his wife and two children, he taught bronze casting at the Royal College of Art for 19 years. He lived the rest of his life there with his family though he did visit Sri Lanka several times and exhibited there. It is worth noting that the leader of the left-wing student association who led the boycott on their innovative visionary teacher, subsequently, in the fullness of time, became a teacher himself at that very institution! This incident gives one an insight into how education policy and methods and ideas have been politicised in a narrow nationalist direction, in the foremost art school over a considerable period of time. Prior to this, the pioneering artist and teacher, David Paynter, was attacked by students for introducing Western art and also for being a Burgher and teaching in English. He too was forced to resign from teaching. Large prints of major European modernist paintings, which were framed and hung on the walls of the art school, were attacked and the glass frames smashed. In the absence of lavishly illustrated art books, these prints were gifted to the college by Paynter, but the students chose to destroy them in a mindless nationalist fervour. So the art school has had a tradition of student activism based on a narrow and deeply deskilling, parochial idea that art education should be based on an unshakable Sinhala Buddhist idea of art in Sri Lanka, as understood by them, defined within the wider Nationalist political rhetoric and ‘Sinhala only’ language policy of the S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s popular front government of 1956. This reactionary student activism and staff activism against change to the curriculum continued over the decades, as a tradition, as has been well documented in the case of Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa’s career as Dean and Vice Chancellor of the same government art school in its subsequent forms as a University. Chandrajeewa joined the art school in 1973 as a student, the year after Tissa Ranasingha resigned and after many years he too went to London, on a scholarship, to learn Bronze casting from Tissa Ranasingha himself, at the Royal College of Art in London. Tissa was also trained in British art schools, Chelsea and Royal College of Art. The recent Anidda (6/3/22), newspaper article by Dr Cyril Gunapala on Chandrajeewa’s academic career as a scholar and administrator, provides a detailed account of the deep history of this art institution and its deplorable activities in maintaining its feudal ethos of patronage and a curriculum and practices anchored in a narrow idea of Sinhala-Buddhist exclusivist culture. The article is a great read, with its biting satire and brilliant analysis of the institution, which appears to spend more energy working out ways to sack every visionary educator they have had, than on the required research-lead teaching. I do hope someone will translate this article into English for the Island. It’s an analytic piece of history, essential reading to understand the history of art education in the country over a very long period. It would also be very useful for Tamil readers to know in some detail about the language policy which led to the abolishing of English as one of the languages of instruction, making the institution monolingual, Sinhala-only. This action terminated the robust exchanges between students in Jaffna and Colombo.

After graduation, both Tissa and Sarath, went out into the provinces for their first jobs. Tissa was an agricultural advisor to farmers in Gannoruwa and Sarath, a Youth Services Officer in Vavuniya District. I get the sense that their work in distant provinces with youth and the peasantry, has perhaps given them wide life experience, which those who go straight into teaching after multiple University degrees lack. (To be concluded next Wednesday)