David Paynter (artist)
| David Shillingford Paynter | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
David Shillingford Paynter 5 March 1900 Almora, India |
| Died | 7 June 1975 (aged 75) Sri Lanka |
| Resting place | Union Church Cemetery, Nuwara Eliya |
| Nationality | Sri Lankan |
| Education |
Trinity College, Kandy, Royal Academy Heywood Institute of Art |
| Occupation | Artist, Teacher |
| Notable work | Murals at Trinity College Chapel, Chapel of the Transfiguration, S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia, Portrait of Ivor Jennings |
This page is about the Sri Lankan Artist. For other people named David Paynter, see
David Shillingford Paynter, RA, OBE (5 March 1900 – 7 June 1975), was an internationally renowned Sri Lankan painter. He was a pioneer creator of a Sri Lankan idiom in what was essentially a Western art form. His most celebrated works are his murals at the Trinity College Chapel in Kandy and the Chapel of the Transfiguration, at S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia. The Sri Lanka Philatelic Bureau commemorated Christmas in 1996 with two stamps featuring the murals from the Trinity Chapel.
David's father, Arthur Stephen Paynter, was born in Bicester in Oxfordshire, where his family owned several breweries. Arthur married Anagi, the daughter of Arnolis Weerasooriyaa, a Sinhalese from the south of Sri Lanka. Both were in the Salvation Army and worked in India and after some years left in order to start the India Christian Mission. Arthur and Anagi moved to Ceylon in 1904, and decided to start a mission in Nuwara Eliya. Thus young David had his primary education at Breeks Memorial School in India, and his secondary education at Trinity College, Kandy.
Apart from the basic guidance he received at Trinity, he had no formal art lessons. Yet David Paynter entered the Royal Academy by winning a five-year scholarship in the open competition with students, many of whom received formal instruction in European art schools.
Paynter won the Royal Academy Gold Medal at the end of the fourth year along with the Edward Stott Travelling Scholarship which gave him two years in Italy. In 1936 he visited London for the third time - a productive and rewarding period in his art career. His one-man exhibition at the Wertheim Gallery in London brought him much recognition from art critics and journals in Europe. By invitation he participated in four international exhibitions in the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg in Rome, in New Delhi and at the World Fair held in New York. From 1923 to 1940 his paintings were exhibited every year at the Royal Academy in London. The themes of most of his early works are religious. In 1923 two of his best pictures The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and the Entombment were considered powerful and dramatic statements of deeply felt religious experiences.
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