Unity in Diversity Painting

The concepts of love, nature and human emotion are the subjects of Sahani Madihage’s paintings. She is an artist that encompasses Sri Lankan tradition in a contemporary sense without harming its strongly rooted heritage. This heritage is presented as existing in the beauty of nature and human emotion in an abstract and expressive manner, creating a unique identity for Sri Lankan culture in the modern world. Her art is a language that communicates her concerns about her surroundings and encompasses her personality. ‘Sahani’ means ‘happiness’ in the Sinhalese language and this personality trait of her is positively expressed through the bright and rich pigments in her art. Her ideal goal is to introduce individuals to the concept of positive energy through the strong visual language presented in her artwork. Sahani is a self-taught artist who learns and experiments with a variety of painting techniques and styles. She often uses a monotonous color palette with a mixture of hues, tints and shades to characterize her artwork. Her paintings are said to be inspired by the surrealist technique of Salvador Dali, the cubist style of Pablo Picasso and the neo-classical and traditional Sri Lankan artwork of Solias Mendis. Sahani documents the physicality of objects and people from different levels of existence and brings them together in scenes that seem to take place outside any average conception of time. These scenes are characterized by a sense of movement and swiftness through the range of textures she creates from paints, paintbrushes, toothbrushes and palette knives. She is a strong believer that art is a subject that deserves to be removed from its materiality and presented as an expression of timelessness. The beauty in Sahani’s artwork lies in the abstract point of view she sees the world in, while it is enhanced by her skill at rendering figures and objects which often creates a sense of freedom and expression!