Justin Deraniyagala

In a Cambridge boxing ring in the early 1920s, a slight and spare Ceylonese law student won his bantamweight Blue, fighting well above the promise of his frame; and the discipline he learned there, the economy of a man who cannot waste a movement, is the first thing to understand about Justin Deraniyagala the painter. He came to art through structure rather than through prettiness, and he distrusted the easy effect for the rest of his life. What he wanted was a picture built to hold its weight, every figure carried right out to the edges of the canvas, nothing slack.

He was born in Colombo in 1903, into one of the island’s most distinguished families: his father, Sir Paul Pieris, was a senior civil servant and a historian of Ceylon, and the household prized learning as a matter of course. Educated at S. Thomas’ College and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read law, he turned to painting only afterwards, at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, studying under Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer and taking its first prize for drawing in 1928. A brief spell followed at the Académie Julian in Paris, and it was in those European years that he absorbed the modern masters he most admired: the structure of early Picasso, the colour of Matisse, the discipline of Braque. Later scholarship has been careful to add that his sources lay as much in the carved forms of Sinhalese masks and in the expressionists as in these Paris men. By his family’s account he moved in their Paris world as well, though the surviving record documents the influence more securely than the acquaintance.

Back in Ceylon he became, in 1943, one of the founding members of the ’43 Group, the circle convened by Lionel Wendt that gave the island a modern art of its own. His subject was almost always the human figure, most often a woman, returning in a few recurring shapes, the mother and child and the bathers among them, and his method was pressure: urgent brushwork, colour used as architecture rather than description, the body held in a tension that never quite resolves. The titles of his best-known canvases carry those subjects: ‘Baby and Tortoise’, ‘Maternity’, ‘The Beggar Woman’ and ‘Bathsheba’, which he also called ‘The Voyeur’. He reworked such pictures obsessively, the paint building up in layers like geological strata, and he rarely signed or dated them, for he seldom judged a canvas finished. He has been called ‘the painter’s painter’, a judgement about craft rather than fame, and the critic John Berger named him a philosopher painter; later scholarship has gone further and named him the greatest of Sri Lanka’s modern painters. A contrast is often drawn between him and George Keyt, that Keyt ‘makes pictures’ while Deraniyagala ‘makes paintings’, the one composing for the eye and the other labouring at the surface itself. His canvases reward the closest looking and give up little at a glance.

The reckoning came at the 28th Venice Biennale in 1956. His oil ‘The Fish’, painted in 1949, was chosen for a UNESCO prize from among more than 4,700 works shown, and was afterwards reproduced by the New York Graphic Society for UNESCO’s World Art series of colour prints. It remains the highest international honour a Ceylonese painter of his generation received, and it rested on a single unshowy picture of a fish, all structure and held colour.

His work is held today largely in private hands, among them the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo, which keeps the core of the ’43 Group under one roof. Deraniyagala died at Pasyala in 1967. The fighter’s economy stayed with him to the end: a man who painted as he had once boxed, giving nothing away, making every mark count.