Cora Abraham

In 1949 a set of art classes for children opened in part of the ’43 Group painter Geoffrey Beling’s house in Melbourne Avenue, Bambalapitiya, and out of those modest rooms grew one of the most consequential teaching lines in modern Sri Lankan art. They took their name from the street by accident: Richard Gabriel, in an absentminded slip of the pen, wrote them down as the Melbourne Art Classes, and the name stuck. The woman behind them was Cora Abraham, who founded the school with the painter Sita Kulasekera and built it on the methods of Beling, in whose home it began. Her importance to the island’s art rests less on what she hung on a wall than on what she released in others: hers is the story of the enabler, the teacher whose reach is measured in the painters who passed through her care.

Her method was a single, unusual conviction, held against the grain of a schooling culture built on correction. She believed that every child carried an individual perception of what the eye sees, and her gift lay in accepting that vision rather than overruling it, encouraging an inherent talent to develop on its own terms while she withheld the instructing hand. In a colonial system that prized the copied cast and the drilled exercise, letting a child keep its own way of seeing was a quiet radicalism, and it drew serious artists to her rooms.

The company she gathered says the rest. Ivan Peries, a founder member of the ’43 Group and one of its leading painters, taught at the Melbourne Art Classes around 1950; Ranjit Fernando, who had carried the Group’s exhibitions to Europe, taught there on his return. From the senior students grew the Young Artists Group, which shared the attitudes and ambitions of the ’43 Group and carried them into the next generation. Neville Weereratne, who would become the movement’s chronicler, was among those associated with her circle, and it was at her school that he met the painter Sybil Keyt, whom he married in 1959.

The classes outlived her. After her death they were renamed the Cora Abraham Art Classes in her honour, continued under her successor Nalini Jayatunge, and survive in Colombo today, so that a garage room from 1949 has kept its line unbroken across three generations of teachers. Her own legacy became the subject of a study by Weereratne, published in her memory.

What she built was a threshold rather than a body of work: the place where a colonial art education gave way to the belief that a young eye was worth trusting, and where several of the island’s modern painters first learned that their own seeing was allowed.

Sources

1. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
2. Daily FT. ‘Cora Abraham Art Classes Now Online.’ https://www.ft.lk/Entertainment-Arts/Cora-Abraham-Art-Classes-now-online/10405-725770
3. de Soysa, Rohan. ’The ‘43 Group: Origins, Aims, Activities and Legacy.’ National Trust of Sri Lanka, 29 September 2016. https://thenationaltrust.lk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/The-43-Group.pdf