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 was one of the Group’s painters, and then, decades on, its historian. 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. He apprenticed afterwards with Ivan Peries, and through him came to know Harry Pieris and the rest of the founders. That schooling 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.

In October 1971 he left for Australia with his wife Sybil and their children, and built a career in Melbourne in journalism and public relations, rising 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. Others followed: ‘The Art of Richard Gabriel’ in 1999, a study of the teacher who had first set him painting; ‘Visions of an Island’, on rare Sri Lankan works in the Christopher Ondaatje collection, in the same year; ‘George Beven: A Life in Art’ in 2004; a select catalogue of the Sapumal Foundation collection in 2009; the National Trust monograph on the sculptor Tissa Ranasinghe in 2013; and ‘A Tribute to Cora Abrahams’ in 2014. His pen did for the Group what no single canvas could: it kept the names, the shows and the arguments of a scattered generation from being lost.

He died in Melbourne on 3 January 2018, at the age of eighty-six. He had served the Group twice, once at the easel and once at the desk, and much of what the world can say of the ’43 Group today, it says in his words.

Sources

1. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
2. Weereratne, Neville. The Art of Richard Gabriel. 1999.
3. Weereratne, Neville. Visions of an Island. 1999.
4. Weereratne, Neville. George Beven: A Life in Art. 2004.
5. Weereratne, Neville. The Sapumal Foundation Collection: A Select Catalogue. 2009.
6. Weereratne, Neville. The Sculpture of Tissa Ranasinghe. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2013.
7. Weereratne, Neville. A Tribute to Cora Abrahams. 2014.
8. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
9. de Soysa, Rohan. ’The ‘43 Group: Origins, Aims, Activities and Legacy.’ National Trust of Sri Lanka, 29 September 2016. https://thenationaltrust.lk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/The-43-Group.pdf
10. Donaldson, Tony. ‘Neville Weereratne: The Artist and His Distant Homeland.’ 2018. https://thuppahis.com/2018/02/17/neville-weereratne-the-artist-and-his-distant-homeland/