A recent trip to Sri Lanka was enlightening in many ways. We took a clockwise route around the southern half of the country and stayed in cities, rain forest and high tea plantations. Art galleries were hard to find other than in trendy cafes so I took some time to find Buddhist temples. To be honest the heat and humidity made cool temples the best places to sit and study the culture of the country.
In Kandy we walked up to the huge Buddha statue that looks down over the city and I grabbed 20 minutes in the temple underneath to make this sketch of a figure clearly in anguish at being in the presence of Buddha in person.
Those few minutes of peace in an otherwise frantic and polluted city were very memorable and really did take me to a place I don’t think I could have reached in any other way. The power of art indeed.