Gamini Warnasuriya

On a wall of the Ceylon Tea Centre in Melbourne, a mural by Gamini Warnasuriya set the island’s decorative line down in an Australian room, a small act of transplantation by a painter who spent his career carrying Ceylon abroad. He trained as an architect and painted alongside it, and the two disciplines meet in the work the chronicle describes: inventive, ornamental pictures whose figures are carried by a confident line and a sure eye for colour.

He came to painting under Aubrey Collette, the founder-member of the ’43 Group, at the Royal College in Colombo, and it is through Collette that his connection to the Group runs. The influence shows in the decorative confidence of the work rather than in any programme; his figures were his own, and by the fourteenth of the Group’s exhibitions, in January 1964, reviewers were struck by paintings whose figures seemed to them reminiscent of ancient Egypt, a stylised, linear manner set apart from the room around them.

His reach abroad came early and drew notice. While still a student he held a one-man show at Melbourne’s Richman Art Galleries, which a critic on The Age judged the best that gallery had shown to that time, and the Australian painter Arnold Shore wrote that Warnasuriya already carried something of an international reputation, his style compounding European contemporary art with a keen sense of his own national tradition. Beside the Tea Centre mural, his recorded works include a portrait of the young pianist Jean White.

After his architectural studies he settled in Perth, in Western Australia.

The shape of the career is clear: an architect who painted, schooled by a ’43 Group founder, whose decorative hand reached Melbourne before it reached Perth. The mural on the Tea Centre wall stands for the whole of it, a Ceylonese line set down far from home.