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 small, sideways nature of that praise is characteristic of how her work was received: noticed in passing, valued for its stillness rather than its noise. She belonged to the Group’s second wave, the painters who came to it once the founders had already fixed its terms, and she held to a register of quiet that the record has tended to under-remember.

She came into that circle by the surest of routes. At the Melbourne Art Classes that Cora Abraham ran in Colombo, one of the seedbeds of the island’s modern painting, she was herself an artist and teacher; she was of that circle, and married the founder-member Richard Gabriel in 1951. 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 exhibited with it regularly for a number of years after.

The paintings themselves were, in the phrase the chronicle keeps returning to, quiet and restrained. At the fourteenth exhibition the reviewers singled out her portraiture, a picture of a boy and 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 the temperament of measure inside a movement often remembered for its bolder voices, and it is a temperament the Group’s history had room for.

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, at the end, as much a company of friends as a programme.

She died in 2001, some 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.