Stars, stalls, and the courage to begin: Finding the Art within KART

Poorna Senadipathi

By Aakil Riyaz

Poorna Senadipathi is a young artist from Colombo,  and by her own description, still figuring it all out. Drawing on a background in psychology, she paints under the name KART, and has been seriously pursuing art for just over a year. 

To sum up Poorna’s work, her art is cosmic in subject and intimate in feeling. She was by her own account always the art kid. Every class she sat in, every sketchbook she filled with her art carried a piece of her soul, but for years all of it was monochrome: pencil sketches, black ink & charcoal. Colour held a feeling of unease with her, until the pandemic arrived, bringing with it a strange window of time. 

As she puts it: “I was so afraid of colour. I always used pencils, black pens, or charcoal. Then during the pandemic, I started painting, and here I am now.” 

The Shift That Changed Everything

For the most part between 2021 and 2024, painting existed at the fringes of Poorna’s life. She undertook commissions occasionally, perhaps once every few months, when someone came across her work online. Having studied psychology at University, she was building a life in that direction and art was a far-cry from what she wanted to do full-time. 

Then in August 2024, while preparing for Comic Con, a simple comment made by a friend was enough to cut through the noise of the day. 

“What are you doing? You clearly love this. You just need to put some real effort into intentionally doing something about it,” she recalls.  Yet, Poorna had an overarching fear of  what her family would say because she imagined that a nudge towards something more stable was only a matter of time. That fear met its test at Kalapola 2025, her first time exhibiting her work at the annual arts fair, she sold nothing. At the end of the day, she waited for the conversation she had been dreading but it never came.

“Now you know what didn’t work this year. Apply that next year and do better,” was all they said. She muses on it still. “I was so confused, in the best way. What do you mean, I can do this again next year? After I got over that, it felt like there was nothing holding me back.”

The endless encouragement and support from friends and family that followed since, has pushed her to try new things she might have otherwise indefinitely deferred.

The Name and the Beginning

The name KART has been intwined with Poorna’s personality for a while, and the name is just as unique as its origin. In early 2021, nearly all of Poorna’s art encompassed K-pop related content, and her friend threw a soft jibe about the world already having K-drama and K-pop, so why not K-art? What was once offered as a joke, in time became the name she eventually kept. 

Poorna has long since moved away from the K-pop genre, but there were occasional callbacks, where she considered leaving the name behind, yet something held her back and this wasn’t sentiment, but a clear eyed recognition of the name KART. 

“I agonised over a name, landed on this one, and now everyone online knows me by it. Why would I change it? Plus, it has a funny backstory, which I quite like,” she says with a laugh.

Kalapola and the 

Community it Builds

Kalapola is an annual arts festival held in Colombo. The festival draws artists from across Sri Lanka to exhibit and showcase their work. Registering for it however, is no mean feat, due to the large numbers or artists clamoring to get their names into the festival. Poorna has attended Kalapola twice (in 2025 and 2026), and both experiences have been shaped by the people around her, as much as the event itself. 

In 2025, both Poorna and a friend were both allocated stalls, while two other friends had been left without one. The pair decided to merge their allocations and give the second stall to those who had missed out. This year, the situation was reversed: a friend who had secured a stall offered to share it with Poorna, who had not been allocated one. This speaks volumes of the silent generosity that runs through the local artist community that she is part of. 

“Thank goodness for good friends,” she says simply, and leaves it at that.

Rs.2 Stamp design art piece

The Creative Process

Poorna’s art is both patient and cumulative in deliverance. Her creative process usually begins in the form of a song, which diverges into a feeling, eventually taking form into a symbol of personal importance to her. She has gathered these threads of creativity over time, allowing them to incubate in her mind before explicitly committing anything to canvas. This linkage of ideas taking physical form are the centrality of Poorna’s creative process. 

In terms of her materials, she works across acrylics, gouache & a texture medium called moulding paste. Moreover, she also throws in fairy lights into her physical pieces, which according to her are not a display flourish, but an element of choice. 

Humanity as the Core Subject

For all that her canvases are filled with stars and galaxies, Poorna is clear-eyed about her actual subject, which is people. Simply put, the cosmos is the setting, humanity is the point. 

“My whole theme and what I paint about, is humanity. All of my inspiration comes from the people I meet and the things I observe. I never run out of ideas, because there’s always someone saying something, or something I come across, that makes me think: humanity is so beautiful,” she says.

The Art & the Artist 

Art has empowered Poorna in a way she did not anticipate. It has made her much closer to people than she ever was before. Not just to her friends, but to strangers who pause at her stall, collectors who share what drew them to a particular piece, and even anyone who takes a minute to give her some feedback on her work. That exchange, as she puts it, is her favourite part of it all. And in that moment, the work stops being hers alone. 

Her advice for anyone intending to carve their own path is quite simple and clearly one drawn from personal experience. 

“There are moments where you have this idea that you really want to do something about, but you keep setting it aside. If it’s something you think about every single day, then that’s a clear sign. Just do it, and don’t let go, no matter the ‘normal’ path looks like. Don’t let go of any idea you carry within yourself,” she says with confidence.

What started as a ripple for KART, has built itself into a vast ocean, gradually compounding over the past year. What this means for Poorna is a strong oeuvre taking shape, a community that has chosen to believe in her work, and the readiness to take on the local art scene by storm in the coming year. 

Painting the unexplored cosmos