Ivan Peries

The shoreline at Dehiwela is low and level, the sea on one side and the ordinary life of the coast on the other, and Ivan Peries returned to it for over thirty years from a house in Essex, thousands of miles distant, painting always from memory. The distance was the point. He had grown up with that horizon in front of him, and once he had left it he seemed to see it more clearly than ever, a strip of sand and water and figures that belonged to no fixed century.

He was born near Colombo on 31 July 1921, into an educated, Anglicised Roman Catholic family, and spent his early years on the western shore at Dehiwela and Mount Lavinia. By Malaka Talwatte’s own record the family lived in a house called ‘Sihagiri’, built by his grandfather Phillip Francis Peries. His father was a doctor who had studied medicine in Scotland; his elder brother, Lester James Peries, would become the leading figure of Sri Lankan cinema. Ivan was recognised as an artist while still in his teens, and on the recommendation of the photographer and critic Lionel Wendt he was taken as a pupil by the painter Harry Pieris, who became his teacher and friend.

He was there at the beginning of the movement. When the painters gathered in Colombo in 1943, Peries was among those who had done the groundwork of bringing them together, and he became a founder member of the ’43 Group. What he painted, though, was quieter than a manifesto: the coast and its people, held in a still, level light. In 1946 a government scholarship took him to London to study at the St John’s Wood School of Art; he returned to Ceylon in 1949, but by 1953 he was back in England, and he settled at Southend-on-Sea, on the Essex estuary, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

The coast never let him go. ‘The coastal landscape remained the dominant visual experience of Ivan Peries’s art’, wrote Senake Bandaranayake and Manel Fonseka in their monograph ‘Ivan Peries, Paintings 1938–88’, and the paintings bear it out: the same low shore, recalled and re-examined across the decades, its stillness deepening as the exile lengthened. Scholarship divides the fifty years of his working life into five periods, at the summit of which stand seven large ‘panel paintings’ made between 1946 and 1960, among them ‘The Wave’ and ‘The Arrival’; a late coda came in the ‘Leaning Tree’ series of 1982. So distinctive was his manner that an early critic coined the word ‘Periesque’ for it. His work entered the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Imperial War Museum in London, and it remains held in Colombo at the Sapumal Foundation, so that the horizon he carried to Essex is kept, now, on both shores.

He died at Southend-on-Sea on 13 February 1988. Critics have called him a painter not of fact but of feeling, and the shore he set down was a landscape of feeling rather than of fact, the remembered coast standing in for the seen one. For more than three decades in England he came back to that one stretch of shore and to little else; the coast at Dehiwela, recalled from an English estuary, remained his single great subject until he died.