Sita Kulasekera

At the ninth exhibition of the ’43 Group, in 1955, a critic stopped before a study of horses and counted it among the happier things he took away from the show. The painter was Sita Kulasekera, and the in-passing nature of that praise is characteristic of how her work was received: noticed quietly, valued for its stillness rather than its noise. She belonged to the Group’s second wave, and her measured, restrained work has been less remembered than the bolder voices around it.

She came to painting as a young artist and teacher, and stood at the making of one of the island’s key art schools: with Cora Abraham she started the Melbourne Art Classes, run on Geoffrey Beling’s methods at his Bambalapitiya home, the studio from which much of the island’s new painting grew. She married the founder-member Richard Gabriel in 1951. Her family was well known and political: her father, Greames Edward Kulasekera, was a landed proprietor, and her mother’s brothers were Philip and Robert Gunawardena, founders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. Her own work first hung with the Group in London, at the Imperial Institute in 1952, the exhibition that carried the ’43 Group abroad for the first time, and she showed with it regularly for some years after.

The paintings themselves were quiet and restrained. At the fourteenth exhibition the Times of Ceylon critic singled out her portraiture, a study of a boy and a girl together, along with the women she rendered in black and white, work that sought its effect through composure and a controlled palette rather than through drama. Hers was a measured temperament, in a movement remembered for its bolder voices, and it held its place among them.

When the Group’s formal exhibitions came to an end, she went on painting within the circle it had made. Between 1962 and 1964 she took part in the ad hoc studio exhibitions held in Colombo alongside Gabriel, L.T.P. Manjusri and others, the small gatherings in which the movement’s later life was quietly kept up after its public season had closed. Her presence in those rooms is a reminder that the ’43 Group was, in the end, held together as much by friendship as by any shared aim.

She died in August 2001, fifteen years before her husband. The study of horses that a critic once carried home in his memory stands well for the whole of it: a painter content to be remembered quietly, for the thing seen clearly and set down without fuss.

Sources

1. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
2. Donaldson, Tony. ‘Simplicity in Life and Art.’ The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka), 28 February 2016. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/160228/plus/simplicity-in-life-and-art-184453.html
3. 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