Ivan Peries

Ivan Peries (31 July 1921 – 13 February 1988) was a Sri Lankan painter, and member of the 43 Group. Born near Colombo, from 1953 he lived in England. He was called 'the Romantic exile' by the group,. because although he only visited his country of birth once again, in 1976, his paintings were odes to Sri Lanka.

Peries' subjects, repeatedly rural life and the ocean shoreline, were of 'a world neither ancient nor modern, clearly recognisable, strangely, hauntingly meaningful and yet ultimately outside the natural experience'. The beauty of Ivan Peries' paintings, considered alongside psychological difficulties he suffered in relation to his cultural dislocation, have made him an important post-colonial artist, and a key figure in the origins of contemporary Sri-Lankan art.

Early life

Ivan Peries grew up in Dehiwela, on the Western shore of Sri Lanka, looking towards the Laccadive sea. His father Dr. James Francis Peries had studied medicine in Scotland, and his mother Ann Gertrude Winifred Jayasuria was a graduate of St. Bridget's Convent in Colombo. Ivan had three siblings: Lester James Peries, Erica, and Noel. The Peries family was a Roman Catholic family that had become anglicized. Ivan was fluent in English from childhood.

Training and early work

Ivan Peries leant towards art as a vocation from a young age, and was a recognised artist by the age of 20. He refused his parents’ offer to take an academic university degree. Photographer Lionel Wendt recommended Harry Pieris as Ivan’s teacher. Harry Pieries became mentor and friend to Ivan. In 1941 Wendt bought Ivan’s ‘Homage to El Greco’.

That year Ivan introduced Richard Gabriel, who he had begun teaching on the strength of his work, to Harry Pieris for further mentoring. Ivan was at the centre of a community of progressive, intellectual Sri-Lankan artists. They included Justin Daraniyagala, George Keyt, Aubrey Collette, George Claessen, WJG Beling, LTP Manjusri, Richard Gabriel, Walter Witharne, and YJ Thuring.

Ivan’s character at this time was ‘excited and tense, [acting] on the spur of the moment’. In the early ‘40s he was ‘frantically engaged in a shuttle service, meeting one artist or another – Harry, Beling, Collette. He went all the way to Nugedola to meet Justin, then back to Lionel Wendt, who was respected by all’. In 1942, Harry Pieris, Daraniyagala and Beling were the judges of a show called the War Effort Exhibition organised by the Sri Lankan Information Department. Ivan won first prize, and Gabriel received four Honourable Mention prizes. In 1943, Wendt orchestrated a meeting of the artists along with Harry Pieris, with Ivan doing ‘the spade work’. The community of progressive Sri Lankan artists met to form an official group, named the 43 Group after the year.

In 1946 Ivan Peries won a government scholarship to the St John's Wood School of Art in London, to train for a further 4 years. During this time he produced a number of panel studies, mainly portraits, figures and nudes. Ivan returned to Sri Lanka in 1949, and painted ‘The Bathers’, hinting at Cezanne; the 43 Group being compared to the Surrealists as a revolutionary conceptual movement.

British diplomat Martin Russell was patron to the 43 Group from its inception, buying all works exbhibited by Keyt in one exhibition, and many works by Ivan Peries in the 1940s, financing his flat in London during the scholarship on the condition that Russell have first call on any paintings Peries sold.

London

Important works followed Ivan’s arrival in London in 1953. The Wave (1955), The Return (1956) and The Arrival (1959-60).

Professor Qadri Ismail postulates that: ‘The problem with Ivan Peries was that he could not be dismissed with a convenient critical phrase or be put out of the way with an easy tag. He was mercurial and so too did his work have that quality. Until the last years of his life…[his] paintings had the air of a whim or fancy…All sorts of things stimulated his imagination: color…shapes…mystery, as in the deep forebodings of the sea and the rumblings of a monsoon equally full of awe, as in the painting known as The Return. There is stark realism in the anxiety with which the family awaits the return of the men gone out to sea.’

These paintings, which became darker in tone, speaking of cultural dislocation and the loss of Lionel Wendt, marked a period of intensity in the painter’s life. Following completion of The Arrival, Ivan was sectioned for temporary insanity; the painting had taken him "two years to plan, six months to execute, working 20 hours a day”. He collapsed and recalled of what followed:

"I spent six months in Friern Barnet, where I was under sedation. Locked in, beaten up, kicked in the chest and put in the padded cell half a dozen times. That, sir, is the price of a "master work."

Looking through Ivan’s process in these works, according to Prof. Ashley Halpe, ‘gives one a richer sense of the complexity of cultural being in a post colonial context and helps to define the heroism of the artist’s triumph over disjuncture and psychic disturbance, enhancing, if that were possible, the capacity of the paintings.’

Later years

Ivan and his wife Veronica (neé) Perry (m. 1955) had four children. They settled in Southend-on-Sea. Ivan returned to the ocean and to a contemplation of the shore-line of Sri Lanka, painting in tempura on canvas and board or watercolour, showing tall trees elongated as his early figures, and round huts, the male and female by the bands of sand, sea and sky, often at dusk, or under moonlight, as though in a dream of a place that was.

Professor Senake Bandaranayake wrote of Ivan’s work at these times that it was: ‘the product of a purely painterly meditation on the painter's indigenous experience. His mature work displays that fine control over feeling and technique that is present in all his work. Influences have already been completely absorbed and digested; they are operative as far as the entire convention of landscape within which the picture exists. Now in his full maturity, yet sufficiently removed in time to have absorbed and digested his experience, Peries has completely mastered his vision and his material.’

Ivan Peries died on the 13th February 1988 of heart failure, only a few weeks before Harry Pieris, who was ill and from whom the knowledge Ivan’s death was withheld for fear it would worsen his condition.

ġ== Influences == ‘Like every painter, Peries learned from others: not just della Francesca, Angelico and El Greco, but Matisse, Cezanne and many more, as Senake Bandaranayake and Manel Fonseka point out in their essential account; and even from some who didn’t paint, like Lionel Wendt.’ Professor Qadri Ismail.

In an account of Ivan and Harry Pieris, 43 Group member Richard Gabriel speaks of Ivan Peries’ main influence from times before the formation of the Group: ‘Ivan also invited me to meet some of his friends. Among them was George Claessen who joined us frequently. We met by the sea, a few minutes walk from Ivan’s place and seated by the rocks watched the roaring and rumbling waves dash against them. Sometimes we walked a fair distance to where the fishermen lived. If they were not out at sea they would be mending nets.’

Public locations of Ivan Peries’ works

Sri Lanka: The Sapumal Foundation, and Anton Wickremasinghe collection in Colombo. The Imperial War Museum and the Victoria & Albert in London, and the Petit Palais in Paris.