Gamini Warnasuriya

Gamini Warnasuriya painted small, Klee-like abstractions and showed them with the ’43 Group, one of the few of its painters who pressed toward abstraction. He came to painting under Aubrey Collette and kept at it while he trained as an architect, the two disciplines meeting in a manner at once inventive and ornamental, carried by a confident line and a sure eye for colour. Architecture won in the end, and after he emigrated he set the brush aside altogether.

It was Collette, a founder-member of the Group, who had taught him at the Royal College in Colombo, and it is through Collette that his connection to the movement runs. His manner was stylised and near-abstract; at the fourteenth of the Group’s exhibitions, in January 1964, its figures struck reviewers as reminiscent of ancient Egypt, a linear idiom 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, and there, in time, gave up painting for good.

An abstract painter schooled by a ’43 Group founder, he turned architect and carried Ceylon abroad before laying the brush down. The small, Klee-like pictures he showed with the Group stand for the painter he chose not to remain.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.