Kushlani Jayasinha, born and raised in Sri Lanka amid turbulent social strife, is a painter whose artistic practice is informed by her Buddhist way of life and her occupational past as a Silicon Valley software engineer and a postdoctoral Physics scholar.
Kushlani’s paintings are created from a synthesis of traditional meditative processes learned from the monks in Sri Lanka, who taught her the gentle wisdom of Buddha and Western experiences of transcendent beauty. From this background, she prepares by studying herself in silence, but she paints with the sounds of romantic music. All of these things—the deep attentive silence of samadhi, the romantic longing, and the wonder of natural landscapes—can bring us out of the cycle of thoughts and into a sharp, freeing life in the current moment.
The painting manifests in careful and deliberate forms that are derived from natural formations but which are abstractly rendered on her canvases: a dreamy coastal fog, a far-off city in the mist, a peaceful body of water. The forms are unavoidably rooted in Kushlani’s conscious consideration of physical properties and the emotional truths of the moment, and the result is something curiously tangible but simultaneously dreamlike.