Art and Lit. Fieldtrip

Since it’s a bit late (9:00 pm! Gasp!) I’ll be brief about this now, and recount more later, or when I get back. First, we started our journey by going to our professor’s house to look at his private collection of art work. Some of it, I really, really liked. By the way, he paid $100 US dollars for his land up in the Kandian hills. Before you get too excited, that’s not typical here, but it’s insane that it’s possible to get land that cheap, no? Anyway, next we had lunch at the ISLE center, and the prof traveled with us to a city a few hours away where we toured an artist’s studio/home to see his work, then saw a play in Sinahala about torture, crooked politicians, and freedom of the press. The next day, we saw about 4 or 5 more art galleries, and spoke with Tissa Abeysekera, the author of one of the novellas we read for class. Then, we came home. It was really a great trip. I think my favorite part was meeting that artist on the first day. He was all smiles, and full of energy. He was boyishly excited to show us all of the works he’d done in the past, and the ones he’s working on now. He’d laugh self-consciously at anything he’d done with a sexual theme, and he had a great sense of humor that showed through in his political cartoons. For instance, there’s one where there’s a scene from hell, and all the demons are vaccinating the hell hounds against the politicians. In any case, we’ll see if this materializes, but he said he’d draw each of us some little doodle before we left for the states (and this is a guy who sells paintings for $40,000 to $50,000 regularly). He was really a great guy.