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Lot Essay
Ivan Peries spent most of his career in England, first studying at the Anglo-French Institute at St. Johns Wood School of Art from 1946 until 1949, before returning to London to live in Southend-on-Sea in 1953. However, “In spite of having spent a major part of his life as a painter abroad, there is nothing in his work which is outside the Ceylonese experience, nothing which displays a distance in subject, style or attitude from Ceylonese life or Ceylonese modes of feeling it is the work of a singular and original creative mind nurtured throughout two decades abroad by the lasting experience of a distant homeland” (S. Bandaranayake quoted in, N. Weereratne, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Art in Sri Lanka, Melbourne, 1993, p. 117).
Peries’s works, especially his landscapes, reveal an escape from the bourgeois, cosmopolitan environs of England and a return to the natural coastal environment of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which he idealized through his art. Peries’s romanticization of the untouched Ceylonese landscape played a key role in the gestation of modernism in Sri Lanka, and the formation of the ’43 Group, which counted artists Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt as members along with Peries. The present lot is a beautiful example of Peries’ landscapes, where the land and sky meet to create a space of action and inaction simultaneously. The feelings of stillness, isolation and singularity are palpable in here; however, there is also a distinct sense of movement created by the artist’s expressionist brushwork. Peries depicts the central figure as an observer being observed, therefore a subject who is never alone even in his solitude.
In this work, painted in 1966, Peries adopts a style he developed using the palette knife to create thick, textured impasto, releasing the energy and movement that hid latent beneath the surface of his more contemplative works. The clouds that seem to tumble in the sky reach down to envelop the coastal landscape and the figure that inhabits it. “This juxtaposition of movement and stasis – and in his best pictures, a dynamic equilibrium between the two – remains the central experience of Peries’s work, investing each picture with a profound intensity of feeling” (S, Bandaranayake and M. Fonseka ed., Ivan Peries Paintings 1938-88, Melbourne, 1996, p. 9).
“Peries is not a painter of fact but of feeling, and even in his most detailed representational scenes the subject of the picture becomes a means by which the artist explores and expresses his own inner feelings as much as those generated by the visual image itself. He reconstructs the elements of a familiar visual experience, usually by a process of simplification, and reassembles them in an entirely personalized way which invests these pictures with their most remarkable artistic qualities; and in this resets what one might call the modernity of these paintings. In them Peries has, so to speak, invented a modern Ceylonese ‘landscape’ art” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987).
Peries’s works, especially his landscapes, reveal an escape from the bourgeois, cosmopolitan environs of England and a return to the natural coastal environment of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which he idealized through his art. Peries’s romanticization of the untouched Ceylonese landscape played a key role in the gestation of modernism in Sri Lanka, and the formation of the ’43 Group, which counted artists Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt as members along with Peries. The present lot is a beautiful example of Peries’ landscapes, where the land and sky meet to create a space of action and inaction simultaneously. The feelings of stillness, isolation and singularity are palpable in here; however, there is also a distinct sense of movement created by the artist’s expressionist brushwork. Peries depicts the central figure as an observer being observed, therefore a subject who is never alone even in his solitude.
In this work, painted in 1966, Peries adopts a style he developed using the palette knife to create thick, textured impasto, releasing the energy and movement that hid latent beneath the surface of his more contemplative works. The clouds that seem to tumble in the sky reach down to envelop the coastal landscape and the figure that inhabits it. “This juxtaposition of movement and stasis – and in his best pictures, a dynamic equilibrium between the two – remains the central experience of Peries’s work, investing each picture with a profound intensity of feeling” (S, Bandaranayake and M. Fonseka ed., Ivan Peries Paintings 1938-88, Melbourne, 1996, p. 9).
“Peries is not a painter of fact but of feeling, and even in his most detailed representational scenes the subject of the picture becomes a means by which the artist explores and expresses his own inner feelings as much as those generated by the visual image itself. He reconstructs the elements of a familiar visual experience, usually by a process of simplification, and reassembles them in an entirely personalized way which invests these pictures with their most remarkable artistic qualities; and in this resets what one might call the modernity of these paintings. In them Peries has, so to speak, invented a modern Ceylonese ‘landscape’ art” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987).