Neville Weereratne

At a desk in Melbourne, some eight thousand miles and half a lifetime from Colombo, a retired newspaper editor assembled the record of a movement he had belonged to as a young man, so that the ’43 Group would have a history and not merely a memory. Neville Weereratne was both a painter who had shown with the Group and, in the end, the man who wrote it down. That double role, participant and chronicler, is the through-line of his life: he made the work and then he made the account that would outlast the work, and Sri Lankan art history rests on the second as much as on the first. To see how one man came to hold both parts, you have to go back to a Colombo classroom in 1945.

He was born in Colombo on 3 December 1931 and schooled at St Joseph’s College, where Richard Gabriel, a founder-member of the ’43 Group, had just been appointed to teach art in 1945, and it was under him that Weereratne learned to paint. That apprenticeship placed him in the second generation of the Group, the younger painters who came up under its founders as the movement matured. He exhibited at its first European show, in London in 1952, and appeared regularly in its Colombo exhibitions through the decade that followed.

His life then turned along the path of many of his generation. In October 1971 he migrated to Australia with his wife Sybil and their four children, and built a career in Melbourne in journalism and public relations, rising in 1982 to edit ‘The Advocate’, the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese’s weekly. Painting waited through those working years. Retirement in 1989 returned him to the easel in earnest, and he showed again, frequently with Sybil, in both Melbourne and Colombo.

The work for which he is now indispensable came out of that same retirement. In 1993 he published ’The ‘43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka’, the standard account of the movement, written by a man who had stood inside it. He followed it with ‘The Art of Richard Gabriel’ in 1999, a study of the teacher who had first set him painting; with ‘Visions of an Island’, on rare Sri Lankan works in the Christopher Ondaatje collection, in the same year; and with the National Trust monograph on the sculptor Tissa Ranasinghe. His pen did for the Group what no single canvas could: it fixed the names, the shows and the arguments of a scattered generation in one durable record.

He died in Melbourne on 3 January 2018, at the age of eighty-six. The chronicle he left behind is the reason so much of what can be said with confidence about the ’43 Group can be said at all, the participant having become, by patient labour in a distant city, the keeper of its account.