Lucky Senanayake, who created Diyabubula

Artist Lucky Senanayake died at the end of May 2021 after a long illness. Born in 1937, his father was a planter and political activist, Reginald Senanayake. Reginald Senanayake was imprisoned by the British for his political activities in India, and he died when Lucky Senanayake was ten years old. After that, the responsibility of raising him was assigned to Florence Senanayake, the mother of Lucky Senanayake, who became Sri Lanka’s first female parliamentarian in 1947. The only formal education he received was at the Royal College, Colombo, and by his own admission he was a regular ‘skip’ from school. He then briefly attended the Melbourne School of Art, Colombo, where he met head teacher Cora Abrahams and Group 43 artist Richard Gabriel. Soon Lucky Senanayake also became a teacher. Lucky Senanayake is basically a ‘made in Sri Lanka’. Although he spent a short time in India and later traveled periodically to the United States to visit his daughter, like many others of his generation, he was not educated abroad and spent very little time in Europe. Largely self-taught, Lucky Senanayake became a master draughtsman and colourist, and one who excelled in various mediums. However, what stood out above all of this was the humor and creativity found in his works.

In the late 1950s, Lucky Senanayake became an architectural draftsman with the firm of Edwards, Reid and Begg. It marked the beginning of a long-term relationship with architect Geoffrey Bawa. Through this connection, Lucky Senanayake’s keen interest in architecture and landscape was laid. Working closely with Ismet Rahim, he created the later famous architectural style of the Bawa office, which was later reproduced in Geoffrey Bawa (1986), the first international work on Bawa. This book, known by many as the ‘White Book’, was written by Brian Brace Taylor. Later, this style was imitated throughout Asia. Through Geoffrey Bawa he became one with the group of friends of Geoffrey Bawa’s brother Bevis Bawa. Among these were the likes of Donald Friend, Barbara Sansoni and Ena da Silva. He seems to have drawn many things from the skills of all these people into his artistic practice. Lucky Senanayake was first encouraged to paint by Donald Friend. Later, when he left Sri Lanka in 1963, he gave his paint kit to Senanayake as a gift. Barbara Sansoni recruited Senanayake to the project to document the ancient buildings of Sri Lanka. This collaboration led to the publication of Sansoni’s famous book Architecture of an Island. Ena de Silva hired Lucky Senanayake in her batik studio, where he created many batik designs along with her son Anil. Later, Ena de Silva often used this design in her batik designs. Over the years he worked variously as a farmer, landscape designer, architect, poet, painter and decorator. In fact, he was very similar to Donald Friend in his interests and skills. In the late 1970s, he even designed a series of Sri Lankan currency notes based on his exquisite plant and animal drawings. But he really excelled as a painter and sculptor.

At the end of the 1960s, Lucky Senanayake’s brother, who was a lawyer, bought a piece of land a few miles south of Dambulla and east of the A9 road with the aim of establishing a chilli farm. The farm was not a success, and in 1972 Lucky Senanayake took it over and began transforming it into his own garden resort. It was not a large area. Its scale was about the size of two football fields. It was mainly covered with scrub and received a constant flow of water from a canal fed from an underground spring. He named the land ‘Water Bubble’.

He may have been initially inspired to develop the Water Bubble by his friends Bevis and Geoffrey Bawa, the two famous gardens built on either side of the Bentota River. But the Water Bubble was very different from Bevis Bawa’s Brief Garden and Geoffrey Bawa’s Saltwater Garden: The Brief Garden was conceived as a series of inter-connected rooms with an interconnecting visual pathway. Geoffrey Bawa’s Salt River Garden was open to the wider world, and its surroundings made it part of the garden itself. In contrast, Lucky Senanayake transformed the arid land of the water bubble into a water-fed green oasis. He built a dam across the canal on his land, which collected the water and connected it to a water system consisting of eight ponds located on the land. Also, around it, he created a dense forest of native trees. Its basis was a series of local trees such as blackberry, blackberry and sandalwood grown from plants collected from the Peradeniya Botanical Garden. Closing the outside world, he created a hidden world in his land. It often felt like an underground environment. In its center he built his house and studio. It was built with a series of platforms set up on several rocks. Its roof was roofed with straw and coconut leaves spread on belek slabs.

Every time I stepped into the bubble, I felt like I was leaving the real world behind and entering a magical magical land ruled by a mysterious lord. All the while, Lucky Senanayake was sitting on his studio platform, and the sight reminded me of a character from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a cross between the characters ‘Cheshire Cat’ and ‘Mad Hatter’. Lucky Senanayake, always dressed only in a saree, was painstakingly drawing a painting while listening to the music emanating from loudspeakers hidden among the surrounding trees. The surroundings were full of animals and birds, some of which were real, but most were carved from metal. We meet these created animals in this magical world like an owl in some places, a leopard in another place, a wild boar near the stream, a horse beyond the pond and a rhinoceros animal in another place. Lucky Senanayake never considered it a hindrance for someone to visit his site unannounced, put down his brush, focused his sparkling eyes and greeted everyone in his soft voice mixed with Sinhala and English.

Diya Bubula first started as a resort that could be visited sporadically. That is, as a community space for like-minded friends and associates. But later, these communal ideals had to give way to more practical considerations. After 1980, it became the main residence of Lucky Senanak. From here he ran a garden design and contracting business called ‘Botanica’ with his friend Noel Dias, creating gardens for homes and hotels across the island. Later, he also established a factory for the production of architectural sculptures here. Finally, in 2014, Lucky Senanayake entered into an agreement with the Barberine Hotel Group for a ‘share issue’ whereby he sold his park to them. He allowed them to develop part of it into a hotel with five ‘villa’ style houses designed by him. He had taken the rest for life insurance.

Lucky Senanayake was Geoffrey Bawa’s favorite artist, and for more than thirty-five years he filled the voids of Bawa’s architectural spaces with sculptures and covered the empty walls with murals and paintings. Senanayake created the giant ‘Bo leaf’ sculpture for Geoffrey Bawa, which was presented at the Osaka World Exhibition in 1970. He designed the electric light chandelier that hangs in the Parliament of Kotte (1982) symbolizing the trees of Maha Thalavergata, because that building was also designed by Bava. The staircase made of Dutch and Sinhalese ‘fighters’ (1996) leading to the top floor of the Light House Hotel, designed by Bawa, is also Senanayake’s design. And the mural he painted for the balcony of the Salt River Garden is now mostly gone. Working with a team of assistants, he created a mural in each of the one hundred and twenty bedrooms of the Hotel Neptune (these have sadly now disappeared).

Despite his poor health, Lucky Senanayake, who continued to paint, sculpt and design gardens into his eighties, constantly entertained his friends with his flute playing, humor and his paintings.

But Lucky Senanayake was not associated with the main art institution system centered in Colombo. There is no mention of him in Senaka Bandaranaike’s famous book Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Also, art critics dismissed him as a mere decorator. The reason is the popular expectations that important artists must stick to one theme, must struggle, must wrestle with mental problems. However, art was not a struggle for Senanayake. Like his closest contemporary David Hockney, Lucky Senanayake loved building and creating. He enjoyed experimenting with his considerable talents and changing themes and different mediums, and he also loved to bring joy to others. He always celebrated beauty, especially the beauty of the natural world. His role as an artist included highly detailed botanical paintings, abstract paintings and sculptures, banknote designs, landscape paintings, erotic paintings and architectural installations. But, like his mentor Donald Friend, he was suspected by many of being too versatile and clever, and was therefore dismissed as merely an entertainer and trickster. However, the day will surely come when he will be recognized: as one of the most talented Sri Lankan artists of his generation and one who changed the way Sri Lankans see themselves.

(David Robson was Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton until 2004. His architectural practice was centered on housing. He was the lead housing architect for the New Town of Washington in the 1970s, and worked as a consultant on the Government of Sri Lanka’s housing program in the early 1980s. (The editorial board of the paper would like to thank Architect C. Anjalendran for inviting Prof. David Robson to compile this article and for co-ordinating the necessary permissions for its translation into Sinhala and Tamil).