Geoffrey Beling

On a canvas from the early 1930s the forms are pared to their basic volumes, a face and a still life broken into planes and faceted like something built rather than merely observed, and the young painter who made it, William James Geoffrey Beling, had gone looking for that language partly in the studios of the modern movement and partly on the rock face at Sigiriya. He was among the first Ceylonese modernists to decide that the island’s own past was a resource and not an embarrassment.

He was born in Gampola on 22 September 1907, the son of William Wright Beling, a Ceylonese watercolourist, from whom he took his first lessons. He went to the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay in 1926 to study art and architecture, and returned to Ceylon in 1928 when his father’s death cut the training short. What he carried back was a modern eye already turning toward home: he looked to the frescoes, the temple murals and the sculptural forms of the island for a vocabulary that Europe alone could not supply, and his paintings of the early 1930s hold that double inheritance, the simplification of the modern movement laid over subjects that were wholly Ceylonese.

The work and the conviction reveal each other. When the ’43 Group was founded in 1943 Beling was among its core members, part of the generation that resolved the island would have a modern art of its own rather than a copy of London or Paris, built by looking at once outward to modernism and inward to Sigiriya. His own painting ran to landscape, still life and portrait, held in the pared, structural manner he had arrived at early.

Then the career turned. On C.F. Winzer’s retirement in 1932 Beling succeeded him as the colony’s Chief Inspector of Art, a post he held until 1967, promoting both Western and Eastern art in schools across the country. The office consumed the time the easel had wanted, and by about 1945 he had, in effect, stopped painting altogether. He gave the movement one more lasting thing: the original plans for the Lionel Wendt Memorial in Colombo, the art centre raised in the name of the photographer who had led the Group, were his.

His output as a painter was therefore small and early, made in a handful of productive years before administration claimed him, which is part of why his name sits quieter than some of his fellows. The pictures that survive keep their place in the account of how Ceylon became modern, and his work has been shown at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka in Colombo. The faceted early canvases remain what he is measured by: the record of a painter who looked to the rock at Sigiriya for a way to be new, and who then spent his working life teaching others to look.