Fareed Uduman

A son opens his late father’s rooms and finds the canvases stacked against the wall, none of them signed, none titled, none dated, painted for no eye but the painter’s own. Some had been nailed up as they were made and left to gather dust behind cupboards and doors; a few had been pressed into service as glass, patching broken windowpanes; one carried a picture on each of its faces. Fareed Uduman had let his work accumulate in near-total privacy, so that a man now counted among the most original modern painters the island produced was, while he lived, known to almost no one. The place to begin is with the two lives he held apart.

The two lives

He was born in 1917. By day he worked as a Hansard reporter, taking down the words of members in the chamber of parliament, and he held to the politics of the left as a supporter of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. Painting was the life he kept for himself, unpaid and unshown, and it drew on a mind stocked far beyond the reporters’ gallery: he read across science, politics, philosophy, religion, medicine, literature and art, and the knowledge he gathered was, by his family’s account, formidable. Born a Muslim, he described himself instead as a humanist, an atheist, a communist and a rationalist, a zealous non-conformist who stood apart from the beliefs he was raised in. He was an urbanite who rarely ventured far from the city, so that the subjects he painted are city-caught, images and encounters observed close to home rather than sought out in the picturesque countryside.

Paint nailed to the wall

He painted on whatever came to hand, cardboard, hardboard, plywood or any other surface he could find, and he left the works unframed, nailing them straight to the wall as he finished them. Most were then forgotten where they hung, cobwebbed and dusty behind cupboards and doors. Much of the early work perished altogether; some canvases had been turned to domestic use, cut down to replace broken windowpanes, and one bore a painting on each of its two sides. After his death in 1985 his son Jomo Uduman began the slow work of gathering, cleaning, repairing and framing what could be saved, and in time retrieved about thirty-five paintings, roughly thirty of them assembled for the first exhibition and a further six recovered in the years that followed. Uduman had not been wholly invisible in his lifetime: in the 1960s the photographer Nihal Fernando showed some of his paintings at Studio Times in Colombo. That one fleeting glimpse aside, the work stayed private until it was posthumously drawn together.

The subjects, and the local eye

His subjects were earthy and direct: carters and their bulls, fisherfolk, working women, animals, and the plainly erotic, treated without apology. He belonged to no group and studied under no master that the record names, and the modernism he arrived at was his own, expressionistic in temper and more concerned with feeling than with finish. The art historian Senake Bandaranayake, setting him beside the ’43 Group masters rather than among them, called the work ‘highly original, sometimes startling and consistently distinctive’.

What gives the paintings their particular flavour is the eye Uduman turned on his own city, and it was this that Ellen Dissanayake singled out when she came to write about the recovered work. She praised his unselfconscious use of genuinely local detail, gathered without once lapsing into the sentimental clichés of picturesque local colour: a woman cutting greens, a gourd vessel of the kind called laabu gediya balanced at her hip, in ‘Podi Cutting Kankun’; a coucal, the atti kukula, set among the broad leaves of the habarala with an elephant behind it in ‘Child with Coconut’; a sanniya mask lending its spiky menace to a figure of the demonic. These were things rarely seen together in life, she observed, combined and orchestrated into a single satisfying composition. In ‘Man in Storm’ the pandanus leaves are worked in agitated strokes into a tumult of natural force, through which an old man carries on unmoved; in ‘Woman in Flight’ the fluttering garment belongs to a pregnant figure. The shape that recurs across the work is the single figure with an animal or an object, the bull, the bird, the fruit, rather than the crowded scene.

The cartoonist and the poet

Painting was one channel of a restless, politically engaged mind; the cartoon was another. In or around 1971 ‘The Nation’, a weekly of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, ran a cartoon competition that Uduman won again and again, until the paper retained him as its cartoonist. The drawings that survive show a sharp awareness of local and world politics and make no secret of his communist sympathies. He wrote as well, filling a monitor’s exercise book with verse, of which ten poems were later chosen for the monograph, a narrow window onto a private world he otherwise kept closed.

Odd Man Out

Recognition, when it came, came after his death. The artist Laki Senanayake walked into Jomo Uduman’s home one day, saw the recovered canvases and was astonished that no one had seen them, and it was he who urged an exhibition and gave it its title, ‘Odd Man Out’. It opened at Gallery 706 in Colombo in June 1993. The paintings were not for sale, and visitors set down in the book their disbelief that a painter of such quality had stayed unknown in the Colombo art world while he lived.

The exhibition drew from Ellen Dissanayake the review that anchors Uduman’s reputation. Writing in the Sunday Observer, she reached for a comparison with Justin Daraniyagala of the ’43 Group: both were expressionistic in their concern with feeling, both, she wrote, ‘use paint as a language’, both made bold use of distortion, and neither had signed, dated or sought to sell his work. She was careful with the limits of the comparison, and careful, too, that the resemblance was not influence but convergence, the two having drawn on the same European moderns and arrived, separately, at a family likeness. Uduman had not trained in the art academies of Europe, as Daraniyagala had, and had never been able to give his whole life to painting, so his work wanted the older artist’s sophistication; yet in his best canvases she found a sensitivity in the handling of paint that Daraniyagala himself, she thought, would have recognised.

After 1985

That first posthumous showing at Gallery 706 was the beginning of a slow gathering-in. In January 2012 some forty of his paintings hung at the Lionel Wendt in Colombo, and in December 2022 a permanent home for the collection, the Sky Gallery of the Fareed Uduman ArtForum, opened on Kirula Road. His son had by then done for the father what the father never did for himself, drawing the scattered, unsigned work into one place and, with the monograph Fareed Uduman: Paintings, Poems & Cartoons, setting the paintings beside the cartoons and the poems, so that the whole of an enigmatic life could at last be read together.

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Sources

1. Uduman, Fareed. Fareed Uduman: Paintings, Poems & Cartoons. Compiled by Jomo Uduman. Colombo.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
3. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
4. The Island. ‘Startlingly Beautiful Pieces of Life and Soul.’ https://island.lk/startlingly-beautiful-pieces-of-life-and-soul/
5. The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka), Plus, 1 January 2012. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/120101/Plus/plus_07.html