Richard Gabriel

On the wall of St Theresa’s Church in Thimbirigasyaya, angels play oriental instruments, their music silent and their maker gone. Richard Gabriel painted them, one commission among the many he made for Catholic churches across the island, and they catch the man in a single image: a modern painter who held to his faith, and to his fellows, for the better part of a century. He was the youngest of the founders of the ’43 Group in Colombo in 1943, and when he died on 19 February 2016, on his ninety-second birthday, he was the last of them left.

He was born on 19 February 1924 and schooled at St Peter’s College in Colombo. His work first hung in public in 1943, at a wartime picture exhibition where the teenager carried off several prizes, and the older painters gathered around Lionel Wendt took him in as the junior member of the group they founded that August. By his own account the invitation came almost by chance: Wendt, calling on Ivan Peries, saw one of the young Gabriel’s paintings standing upside down, found it striking even so, and asked why they should not rope him in too. At St Peter’s his brother Edmund had introduced him, early in 1941, to Ivan Peries, who became his master for life; he learned too from Harry Pieris, whose only pupil he was and who would take no fee. In 1944, at twenty, he was made art master of St Joseph’s College, then teaching from a branch at Borella, its Maradana buildings left behind when the Japanese air raid on Colombo in 1942 scattered the city’s schools into wartime exile. In 1952 a British Council scholarship sent him to the Chelsea School of Art in London; after a falling-out with a tutor he is said to have left to work under the painter Peter de Francia, who opened to him the techniques of Chagall and the School of Paris.

Where Keyt reached for Sanskrit lovers and Ivan Peries for the low shoreline, Gabriel turned to the common life and the Christian story. He worked in several media at once: linocut and woodcut, etching, wood sculpture, and the wall murals that occupied him for decades. In 1975 he made ‘The Cross’, a suite of etchings on the Stations of the Cross, the fourteen Stations and a closing Resurrection, printed in only thirty-three hand-bound copies; he had learned the etching from Ranil Deraniyagala. In wood he carved an eight-foot ‘Risen Christ’ for the Jesuit chapel at Bambalapitiya and a Madonna of some eight and a half feet for the national seminary at Ampitiya, near Kandy. Among his church murals were those at Christ the King, Pannipitiya. He made too a notable series of black-and-white woodcuts, work that places him among the early figures of original printmaking in Sri Lanka. His subjects were the village, the labourer and the sacred scene, rendered with the flattened, structural clarity the Group had drawn from Sigiriya and from Europe together.

The record reaches beyond the island. Gabriel exhibited in Britain and France in 1952 and 1953, and took prizes at the Venice and São Paulo biennales in the years that followed; his ‘Fighting Bulls’ was bought for the permanent collection of the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris in 1953, and in 1964, its four-hundredth year, the Florentine Academy of the Arts of Design, founded to honour Michelangelo, made him an honorary member for his woodcuts. He taught as well, at the Cora Abraham art school in Colombo, handing on what he knew. He married the painter Sita Kulasekera in 1951; herself a Group exhibitor, she had shown at the Imperial Institute in London in 1952.

In 2002 he left Colombo for Melbourne, where he lived out his last years, still the bridge between the first modernists and the artists who came after them. He had entered the Group as a boy of nineteen and outlived every colleague who convened it. On the wall at St Theresa’s his angels play on, a modern painter’s hand turned to the service of an old faith.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Tammita-Delgoda, SinhaRaja. George Keyt: The Absence of a Desired Image.
3. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.