Manjula Welagedara

Manjula Welagedara's paintings are mainly based on nature. Her paintings reflect her interest in nature. She says she loves to express her inner feelings towards nature through her artwork.

Art and craft have been her favorite pastime from her childhood days. Art has played a major role in her life and has given her the confidence to move on. That was when she was boarded, in the school boarding when she was a six-year-old. She remembers drawing pictures one after another to forget her homesickness. She says that she was always encouraged and motivated in Art and craft by her art teachers and some of her class teachers in primary school. However, she says she was regretting not being able to do Art as a subject for her Advanced level exam due to parental pressures. Nevertheless, she does not have any regrets now as she has come back to the passion she had as a child and painting and studying the subject that made her happy some years ago.

In the year 1999, she participated in a poster competition which was organized by the Women and Children's affairs ministry of Sri Lanka and won third place. Furthermore, she learnt to paint with Acrylic and Oil paints from some professional artists who conduct classes at the Art Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Manjula is influenced by the art of Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and the abstract art of Jackson Pollock. She says she likes mixed media art too. She thinks that her paintings reveal her interest in the above-mentioned fields.

Manjula had the privilege to exhibit three of her paintings in an online art gallery named Lattitudes in the year 2019. She participated in a Virtual exhibition, which was organized by the Hype studio in August 2021.