Aubrey Collette

Across a Colombo breakfast table in the 1950s a politician found himself reduced to a few merciless lines, his vanity and his manner caught more exactly in a newspaper cartoon than any photograph could have managed, and the hand that had done it belonged to a founding member of the island’s first modern art movement. Aubrey Collette had an eye for character, and it made him first a painter and then, more dangerously, a satirist.

He was born in Ceylon in 1920, the son of a photographer. He learned to draw in the Colombo class of David Paynter, the academically trained painter newly back from the Royal Academy schools in London, and there he worked alongside Ivan Peries, another who would help make the modern movement. When the ’43 Group was founded in 1943 Collette was among its founding members, a younger voice in a circle that had set itself against Victorian naturalism and the colonial academy.

Painting, though, was not where his gift for the human face would do its sharpest work. He taught art at Royal College around 1946, and through those years he was drawing political cartoons for the Times of Ceylon and the Ceylon Observer, reading the politics of a newly independent country and rendering its figures with a caricaturist’s precision. His pen turned to the language politics and the communal currents of the 1950s, and it did not flatter. An early collection, ‘Ceylon Since Soulbury’, gathered the cartoons of the immediate post-war years.

The precision had a cost. By 1961, by his own account and that of those who recorded the period, the hostility his cartoons provoked had grown enough that he left Ceylon for Australia, and he lived the rest of his life there. Exile did not still the pen. He drew for The Bulletin and then joined The Australian as an editorial cartoonist, worked later for the Melbourne Herald, and kept his connections with the Asian press; his comic strip ‘Sun Tan’ ran to an Asian readership. In 1970 he was awarded the Walkley Award, the Australian press’s own recognition of his craft.

He died in 1992. The record of him now runs on two tracks that were always one gift: the ’43 Group painter and the newspaper satirist, both grounded in the same unusual capacity to find a person’s essence and set it down in a few lines. His work sits in the account of Sri Lankan modern art and has been shown at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka. The politician reduced at that breakfast table might have preferred the photograph; what he got was the truer likeness, and the reason its maker had eventually to leave.