Many people visit Sigiriya because it is one of the main attractions in Sri Lanka, but I went there for an unusual reason. Many years ago I tried my hand at painting. Unfortunately, my paintings weren't very good but I didn't know it at that time. In my own "humble" opinion they were as good as Vincent van Gogh's if not better. So I wanted to sell them to a well-known Art Gallery in the most expensive part of Colombo.
It was a perfectly built building with several floors of Teak and it did not have an elevator but a finely built staircase. On every floor, there were marble statues and paintings of every kind, oils, acrylics, watercolors, and drawings that took my breath away. But there was also a certain coldness. Perhaps it was the air conditioning, but the receptionist was so distant that I felt she would have regarded me a little better if I had worn better clothes. And the salesgirl, though friendly, was nervous, and I wondered whether it was me or something else. But I wanted to make a strong impression in case they took my position lightly, so in my best voice I asked the salesgirl how many paintings they sold every day. She thought about it for a minute and said "the question you must ask is how many paintings we sell a month".
The manager of the fifth floor, a big middle-aged man with a thick mustache, spied on me. Perhaps he was worried I would nick a painting. He walked up to me and engaged in small talk, but lost all interest in me when he realized that what I really wanted to do was to sell rather than buy, and he walked away without a word. But what really surprised me was the director, a proud woman who considered me and my paintings poorly. From what I understood her great-grandfather was a very clever man who made a great fortune in the art business. You could see his photo hanging there with profound intelligent cow-like eyes.
Unfortunately, several bad marriages over successive generations had resulted in her, and now I had to face the consequences. She considered the paintings poorly and at first rejected one of the paintings, and seemed to accept the other three. She considered again and rejected another, and a while later decided all four were not good. She said that compared to the paintings they had on display by well-known artists my paintings looked childish. Then she said, "I could accept it but they would end up in a corner of this building and probably get lost". And then she said in her perfect accent "If you come again make sure you make an appointment first." But what really blew the wind off my sails was as I was walking away the paintings tucked and heavy in my hands she asked in a very firm voice "weren't you the one who called and complained about our watercolor paper."
About three months earlier I did complain but I was impeccably polite and I did not know that she was the director. I went home disappointed and did not paint for another week, but then a strange thought came to my mind. What if the director was right, what if my paintings were really not good. This thought worried me no end. To cheer myself up I decided to watch movies. Sinhala movies no doubt have artistic merit, but have a slow snail-like quality to them, after a failed love affair a man goes to live in an isolated lighthouse to avoid human contact, grows a beard, and kind of stays in the lighthouse for the rest of his life, and that’s how the story ends. In another movie an upper-middle-class family falls on bad times, unable to keep up with the changing times, they do crazy things like being involved in a failed revolution. To be honest, these movies were interesting but weren’t very uplifting, so I decided to also watch Tamil movies. Tamil movies are action-packed, one showed the incredibly charismatic MGR, dancing around in Tibet or somewhere with a red suitcase while singing an energetic song - (Puthiya Vaanam, Puthiya Bhoomi), the only problem was he looks old for that role. The trouble with MGR was that his broad face looked old even when he was young. The same was true of Sivaji Ganesan, Gemini Ganesan, and many others in the old movies. But Sri Lanka’s answer to South Indian action heroes was GGG, a man whose voice was so rough and low that you sometimes wondered whether it was a voice at all and not a helicopter crashing. He paired up with MMM, to make some great movies. Unfortunately, he, like MGR later decided to enter politics, and when people asked him why they could not meet him, asked them to buy a ticket and watch one of his movies.
Unfortunately watching these movies was not getting me anywhere as an artist. So to make me feel better, I decided to go to a place near the Vihara Maha Devi Park in Colombo, where art students displayed paintings on both sides of the road. They were wonderful paintings using the brightest of colors. But one thing I noticed was that many of them featured Sigiriya, either as seen from the jungle or the frescoes themselves. And I realized that much in Sri Lanka was inspired by Sigiriya. So in a last-ditch attempt to resurrect my painting career, I decided to visit Sigiriya.
Awesome
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