LONDON.- Senaka Senanayake's work can be found in the White House, the UN building in New York, in museums, private collections and corporate headquarters of multinationals around the world. He has held over a hundred exhibitions in over 18 countries spanning the five continents. Now he is coming to the Grosvenor Gallery in London this June.

The painting in the White House depicts a seascape in Sri Lanka and was given by the Government of Sri Lanka to President Lyndon Johnson. The United Nations painting depicting rice cultivation was a commission by the UN architect Abel Sorensen.

Senaka Senanayake is Sri Lanka's foremost artist. Starting out as a child prodigy – his first exhibition in America was when he was just nine years old – has recently turned his attention to the flora and fauna of the rain-forest. His exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery at 35 Bury Street, London will run from June 1st - 18th.

Pictures in this exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery range in price from £6,000 to £40,000.

A gifted cricketer like so many Sri Lankans, he captained the Yale University side where he studied. Now he stands at the crease to bat for man, using his art, against the loss of our environment.

When he was just nine years old an American journalist from the Christian Science Monitor newspaper wrote an article about him and this led to his first show in San Diego California.

Senaka Senanayake is a painter of our vanishing environment blending vibrant colours with enhanced intensity that captures the viewer’s attention immediately. He is one of those painters whose work is his signature, evident as his from 100 yards away.

Charlie Moore of the Grosvenor Gallery, now at 35 Bury Street, London, says: “Senaka has rightly been described as ‘nature's evangelist’. His native Sri Lanka is his muse and his canvasses capture the vibrancy of his environment – brightly coloured parrots, insects, frogs, in a jungle teeming with colour and movement.

“His work is as much a lament as a love song to a vanishing world. Senaka's painterly language speaks to us about tolerance, co-existence, beauty and balance, and warns us about what we are on the verge of losing, our priceless birth-right, the wonders of the natural world which comes to its most magnificent fruition in the world’s rain forests.”

When looking at Senaka’s art we respond instinctively seeing a world we long to have saved and to experience in person.

Speaking about his passion for the rain forest Senaka says: “About fifteen years ago my cousin, an environmentalist living in Ecuador visited us in Colombo and inspired me to paint images of Sri Lankan fauna and flora. I opted to paint the positive aspects of the rain forest rather than the destruction of it. As an artist I felt I could use my medium to highlight the need to preserve the remaining rain forests of Sri where we have lost about 70% of this spectacular and irreplaceable environment.”