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; by fifteen he had already carried off prizes at the Ceylon Society of Arts exhibitions. 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; of all the ’43 Group’s painters he has been called the finest landscapist. In his first years he painted so nearly like George Keyt, with whom he had come up under Winzer, that their canvases were hard to tell apart; they showed together in 1930 and again in 1932, and in January 1931 Winzer singled the two of them out in the London journal ‘The Studio’ as pioneers of a more vital painting than the academy allowed. Among his finest portraits is one of Lionel Wendt, seated in a flaming dressing gown at his Steinway grand.

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. There was a deeper turn beneath the practical one: a man of ardent Christian faith, he held all the same that art should not be pressed into the service of religion and would paint no religious subject, allowing himself only a copy of El Greco’s ‘Resurrection’, and in his later years he gave himself over to a missionary vocation. His teaching reached outside the schools as well: it was in a part of his own Bambalapitiya house that Cora Abraham and Sita Kulasekera began the Melbourne Art Classes, working from his methods, which trained a later generation of the island’s painters. He gave the movement one more lasting thing. The Lionel Wendt Memorial in Colombo, the art centre raised in the name of the photographer who had led the Group, was built to his original plans, which he had drawn at the invitation of its chief trustee, Harold Peiris.

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. What survives is a slim body of work that counts for more than its size, the early proof that a Ceylonese modernism could be built, left by a painter who then set down the brush and gave the rest of his life to making room for those who came after.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Tammita-Delgoda, SinhaRaja. George Keyt: The Absence of a Desired Image.
3. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
4. de Soysa, Rohan. ’The ‘43 Group: Origins, Aims, Activities and Legacy.’ National Trust of Sri Lanka, 29 September 2016. https://thenationaltrust.lk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/The-43-Group.pdf