George Beven

The portrait was built up not with a brush but with a toothbrush, worked in monochrome until the face of a dancer emerged, and when Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov saw their own likenesses they signed them. That was George Beven’s method at its most singular, and it grew from a lifelong subject he never left: the human figure and the human face, which he pursued through oil, gouache, poster colour, illustration and fashion design across a career of more than half a century.

He was born in 1929 in Negombo, and the drawing came before the training. Working at the Ceylon Observer, he took evening classes at Heywood Art College, where he met David Paynter and learned from him to draw the figure, an apprenticeship that fixed the human form at the centre of everything he would make and rooted him in the teaching line that ran through the modern generation. In 1955 Associated Newspapers of Ceylon sent him to the Saint Martin’s School of Art in London to develop his fashion design and illustration, so that his eye was schooled both in the life class and in the disciplines of commercial art.

His first solo exhibition came in 1958, at the Royal Empire Society in London, and the portraits followed for decades. Through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s he worked in a monochrome period whose toothbrush portraits took in the great dancers of the age and figures of Hollywood, while in oil he applied paint with his fingers, pressing the medium directly into the likeness. He held exhibitions at Barefoot and at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre in Colombo, keeping his work before a Sri Lankan public even as his reputation reached beyond it, and he came to be widely regarded as one of the island’s finest figurative painters.

He died in London on 29 January 2023, aged ninety-three. His foundation lay in the modern era, in Paynter’s evening class and the London of the 1950s, and his fame carried well into the new century, which places him at the hinge between the modern movement and the artists who followed. The toothbrush portraits remain the emblem of him: a face conjured by an unlikely instrument, and then, in the dancers’ own hands, signed back into the world it came from.