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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 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).
Working in London in the 1960s, far from the place he spent his childhood on the idyllic western coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Peries composed a number of landscapes. These works “have a new quietness; the experience of twenty years of painting is distilled in the rich browns of sunset and warm grays and whites of a dawn. What we have now is an idealised landscape” (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, unpaginated). These romanticized depictions of the Ceylonese coast and Laccadive Sea were central to the burgeoning modernist movement in Sri Lanka pushed forward by Peries and the other members of the 43 Group such as Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt.
While Peries broke out of the strict conventions of the Ceylon Society of Arts, there remained in his work a continuity with the traditions that preceded it. “The purification and idealisation of experience that is a persistent quality of Peries' art, the prevailing moods, the often gentle and controlled handling of feeling and emotion, the almost melodic use of colour continually enhanced by a genuine sensuousness, are all qualities which echo some major aspect of the Sinhalese artistic tradition” (S. Bandaranayake, Ibid., unpaginated). The present lot is a fine example from Peries’ most emblematic period. While the motionless and elongated human and tree forms suggest stillness, there is palpable energy brimming under the surface. Between overcast skies and a dark sea, the boat’s sail is full, implying a strong breeze and rough waters to anybody familiar with coastal life. “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., Ibid., 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, Ibid., 1987, unpaginated).
Working in London in the 1960s, far from the place he spent his childhood on the idyllic western coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Peries composed a number of landscapes. These works “have a new quietness; the experience of twenty years of painting is distilled in the rich browns of sunset and warm grays and whites of a dawn. What we have now is an idealised landscape” (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, unpaginated). These romanticized depictions of the Ceylonese coast and Laccadive Sea were central to the burgeoning modernist movement in Sri Lanka pushed forward by Peries and the other members of the 43 Group such as Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt.
While Peries broke out of the strict conventions of the Ceylon Society of Arts, there remained in his work a continuity with the traditions that preceded it. “The purification and idealisation of experience that is a persistent quality of Peries' art, the prevailing moods, the often gentle and controlled handling of feeling and emotion, the almost melodic use of colour continually enhanced by a genuine sensuousness, are all qualities which echo some major aspect of the Sinhalese artistic tradition” (S. Bandaranayake, Ibid., unpaginated). The present lot is a fine example from Peries’ most emblematic period. While the motionless and elongated human and tree forms suggest stillness, there is palpable energy brimming under the surface. Between overcast skies and a dark sea, the boat’s sail is full, implying a strong breeze and rough waters to anybody familiar with coastal life. “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., Ibid., 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, Ibid., 1987, unpaginated).