Donald Friend

On a verandah at Brief, the hillside garden Bevis Bawa had cut into the coconut country behind Bentota, an Australian painter is at work on a set of doors, laying gods, animals and bathers across the panels in gold and dense colour. Donald Friend had come to Ceylon for a short visit and stayed close to five years, and those doors, now held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, remain the most quoted thing he made on the island. To place him is to place a modern foreigner in an old lineage: the visiting artist who fell for Ceylon and drew it, the twentieth-century heir to the British painters who had done the same a century before.

He was born on 6 February 1915 at Cremorne in Sydney, and spent much of his life as an expatriate, moving between London, Nigeria, Italy, the Torres Strait and finally Ceylon. Robert Hughes, no easy admirer, called him one of the two finest draughtsmen of the nude in Australia while judging that he was not a major one; the line, the wit and the appetite for the exotic were the constants of his art. He reached Ceylon in 1957 as the guest of Bevis Bawa, the tall former aide-de-camp and garden-maker whose younger brother was the architect Geoffrey Bawa, and settled into the Brief estate as though he had found the subject he had been circling for years.

The Ceylon years, from 1957 to 1962, were among his most inventive. He drew the streets and people of Galle and Colombo, filled sketchbooks with the island’s faces and festivals, and pushed into new materials, working as a sculptor in aluminium and copper alongside the painting. Brief and Geoffrey Bawa’s garden at Lunuganga still hold his work, and it was for that circle, the loose company of architects, gardeners and hosts who were remaking the idea of a Ceylonese modern, that he did some of his freest work. The painted doors are the emblem of it: a foreign hand setting down a private mythology of the tropics on the threshold of a Bawa house.

He kept, all his life, an enormous diary. The National Library of Australia published it in four volumes between 2001 and 2006, and it stands as one of the fullest records an Australian artist has left of an expatriate life. Its candour also darkened his reputation permanently, for the diaries set down his sexual relationships with boys plainly and without concealment, and the reassessment that followed their publication has become inseparable from his name. A serious account of the man holds the achievement and that record in the same view, and states both.

What survives on the island is the work: the doors, the garden pieces, the drawings of a coast that a succession of foreign artists had found hard to leave. Friend arrived meaning to pass through, and Ceylon kept him, as it had kept the visiting painters before him, long enough to make him part of the place he came to draw.