George Beven

The face was built up with a toothbrush rather than a brush, its bristles flicking Indian ink across cartridge paper until a dancer looked out of the monochrome, and when the sitters saw their own likenesses, several of them signed the sheet that carried the face. Rudolf Nureyev was among them, with Margot Fonteyn and Mikhail Baryshnikov beside him. That was George Beven’s method at its most singular, one invention in a working life given over to a single subject he never left: the human figure and the human face, which he pursued through oil, gouache, ink, illustration and fashion design across more than half a century.

From Negombo to Lake House

He was born on 8 June 1929 in Negombo, the western fishing town the Portuguese and the Dutch had each in turn made their own, and the drawing came before any training. His mother, Kathleen, born Wright, was a gifted pianist who had taken the De Soysa Gold Medal for music and kept the household as a music teacher; his father, Lorenz Beven, superintended a coconut estate. At Newstead, the girls’ school where his mother taught and where he began his own education, a teacher named Miss Jayawardene entered his drawings in international competitions and won prizes for the school; at twelve he moved to the all-boys Maris Stella College, run by the Marist Brothers, where art was taught not at all. In the early 1950s he was also a celebrated tap dancer, partnered by Romayne Dias, performing in revue and cabaret across Colombo.

Drawing remained the constant. On a friend’s suggestion he sent some of his black-and-white ink work to the Ceylon Observer, and the women’s-page editor called him in; he joined Lake House as the first artist the paper employed, supplying the women’s pages with fashion drawings and the feature columns with illustrations, from a desk in the Features Room. Fashion and the human figure, the twin disciplines of the rest of his life, were in place before he was twenty-one.

Heywood, Paynter and London

Beven enrolled at the Government College of Fine Arts at Heywood, the Cinnamon Gardens house whose name it took, studying under its first principal J. D. A. Perera and under David Paynter. It was Paynter, the leading draughtsman of the island’s academic tradition, whom he named as his mentor and inspiration, and from whom he learned to draw the human figure, an apprenticeship that fixed the human form at the centre of everything he would make. He took the art teachers’ examination and qualified to teach. In 1955 Lake House sent him to St Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross Road, London, to study fashion drawing and illustration under Elizabeth Suter and Ben Nicholson; in the evening life classes there he drew the male nude, a subject he had never met at Heywood. He was back at his desk in Colombo by 1956.

The fingers and the mat

That same year two visiting painters changed the way he worked. Nicolai Michutouchkine, of Russian ancestry and French citizenship, and the Austrian Elizabeth Brunner exhibited at the Lionel Wendt Gallery, painting on canvas and on rush mats, and Beven fell in with them. Too short of money to buy brushes, he pressed oil paint onto local rush mats, paduru, with his index finger and then with his whole hand, driving the pigment directly into the likeness across a coarse woven ground; the same mats had to be sought from Burma and southern India when the local ones ran out. The novelty travelled: Pathé Pictorial filmed him at work, and the newsreel of the Sri Lankan who painted in oils with his fingers went round the cinemas of Britain. From these years comes the 1957 Self Portrait on rush mat, the method turned on the maker himself.

His first one-man show had opened in Colombo, at the United States Information Service; and in January 1958 the Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society gave him his first London exhibition, opened at the Royal Empire Society building on 7 January by the acting High Commissioner for Ceylon. Twenty-seven oils hung there, many of them worked with the fingers on Burmese and Sri Lankan mats. The London press took to the exotic craft, and the Glasgow Herald, struck by the movement in his Kandyan and low-country dancers, called him an ‘eastern Degas’; a reviewer admired the bright, broken colour he coaxed from the rough fibre and the drama of paint laid on by hand.

The Monotone Period

The toothbrush method he had picked up at St Martin’s, where flicking ink off the bristles served to stipple a background behind a fashion drawing. Through the following decades in London he made it an art of its own, building large monochrome portraits he called his ‘monotones’ by spraying Indian ink, and later coloured inks with the occasional touch of gold, off a toothbrush onto cartridge paper; the heads had to be enlarged beyond life, since the flicked ink resisted any finer control. Film stars and dancers filled the Chelsea clubs and restaurants that showed the work: Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland among the film figures, and among the dancers Nureyev, Fonteyn and Baryshnikov, several of whom signed their own likenesses. A monotone of Princess Margaret, commissioned after a diner saw his pictures on a club wall, so pleased its subject that it came to hang at Kensington Palace. In 1977 Francois de Louville invited him into a London exhibition of the male nude alongside Craigie Aitchison, Elisabeth Frink, David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj, and two of his monotones were reproduced the following year in the Phaidon volume The Male Nude: A Modern View. Admirers spoke of an uncanny inner perception in these monochrome heads, a reading of the sitter that went past mere likeness into something felt.

The colourist returns

He had taken British citizenship in 1960, and for thirty-five years earned his living outside art, in the London travel trade, leading one of the first British tour groups into China during the Cultural Revolution and sketching the faces he met from Papua New Guinea to the Maldives; painting stayed an evening and weekend pursuit. When his agency failed and he found himself, in his fifties, no longer employable, he went back to full-time study and to colour, and it is the late work, in gouache and oil crayon on paper, on which his standing as a colourist rests. He had begun showing in Colombo again in 1980, with an exhibition of monotone faces at the Lionel Wendt Gallery, and about then began printing his own designs in silk-screen on cotton and silk, and returned there through the Serendipity exhibitions and the solo shows of the 1990s with a widening palette and Sri Lankan subjects: the fishermen and matriarchs of Negombo, the dancers of the perahera and of the Chitrasena company, the market stall and the shrine. His 1995 exhibition was read by the critic Alfreda de Silva as struck through with blue, cool and vibrant by turns, the colour of the jazz he loved. The finger-painting newspaper illustrator of the 1950s had become, by common consent, one of the island’s finest figurative painters, remembered above all for his use of colour.

Two homes

Behind the colour lay a long companionship. In May 1970, at the open-air Sunday exhibition strung along the Bayswater Road beside Kensington Gardens, Beven met the German-born dancer and choreographer Wolfgang Stange over a watercolour of a canal scene, and the friendship held for the rest of his life. He designed the costumes and sets for Stange’s Amici Dance Theatre Company, whose performers danced with and without disabilities, and he gave much of his later energy to teaching art to displaced and disabled children in Sri Lanka, at Vavuniya and through the British Council and the Sunera Foundation. He kept two homes, one in London and one in Negombo, and returned to the town of his birth two or three times a year. He died in London on 29 January 2023, aged ninety-three.

The toothbrush portraits remain the emblem of him, a face conjured by an unlikely instrument and then, in the sitters’ own hands, signed back into the world it came from. The deeper achievement was the one he reached late: the colour of his Negombo years, in which a designer’s trained eye and a draughtsman’s schooled hand found at last a subject wholly his own.

Sources

1. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
2. Weereratne, Neville. George Beven: A Life in Art. Colombo, 2004.
3. Wikipedia. ‘George Beven.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Beven
4. The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka). ‘Beven’s Back.’ 1 September 2013. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/130901/plus/bevens-back-60188.html
5. The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka). ‘Beven’s Masterstrokes across Seven Decades.’ 18 August 2019. https://sundaytimes.lk/190818/plus/bevens-masterstrokes-across-seven-decades-363111.html