Our classmate, Senaka Senanayake (SY), is reputedly Sri Lanka’s premier artist and has participated in numerous solo-artist exhibitions throughout the world. The Sri Lankan newspaper, Mirror Citizen, recently ran a profile of Senaka, including an interview. See the link below for the full article (and photos). Here is an excerpt: “Senaka Senanayake is a Sri Lankan artist who attained fame early in life as a prodigy, for his works of art. He held his first international one-man exhibition at the age of ten, in New York. Although he painted copiously and held many shows both in his native country as well as abroad, it was only after he went to Yale school for graduation in Art and Architecture, [that he realized] that his true calling lay in the field of art. Yale at that time was pulsating with vibrant political activities and Senaka with his family’s political background was naturally drawn to it. However, those years at Yale were more crucial for him as an artist, for till then he had been largely self-taught. But at Yale, the formal classes of art training expanded his knowledge to the history of art of the entire world till then. After moving back to Sri Lanka post Yale, Senaka immersed himself headlong into painting. His years of training at Yale had helped him evolve a mode of expression which had matured greatly. He also began to delve deeper into the various environmental issues concerning Sri Lanka. Of them, he was particularly bothered by the rapidly decreasing plight of the rain forests, and his present series of works are an attempt to engage the audiences by making them aware of this pertinent situation.”

http://mirrorcitizen.dailymirror.lk/2015/06/04/senaka-senanayake/