Stanley Abeyesinghe

For six days in November 1945, in the Photographic Society Rooms at 525 Darley Road in Colombo, a largely self-taught painter hung seventy-four paintings and a single piece of sculpture, and a critic writing as R.B.T. in the Times of Ceylon concluded that Ceylon painting had reached ‘a turning point of great promise’, adding that in Abeyesinghe’s case ‘the measure is a full one’. Two years later the Indian weekly Forum set him beside George Keyt in a single breath: if Keyt was close to Picasso, its editor wrote, Stanley Abeyesinghe was an ‘artist cousin’ of Matthew Smith, richer in Ceylonese folk feeling than in Indian mythology, and both men, alone among their contemporaries, had absorbed European painting without losing themselves in it. Stanley Abeyesinghe (1914–1993) belonged to the small company who carried modern art in Sri Lanka out of its infancy, and he did it as a painter first, holding throughout to a restlessness of manner that kept him from ever becoming the prisoner of a style.

He was born in Colombo on 26 January 1914, into a family that carried the name Gomis Abeyesinghe, the ‘Gomis’ an appendage gathered in Portuguese times. His father worked on the Ceylon Government Railway, then being driven up into the hill country to carry the tea crop down from the plantations to the harbour at Colombo, a transferable post that moved the household about the country, and his schooling followed the moves: three years at St Joseph’s College in Colombo, a spell at St Patrick’s College in Jaffna when his father was transferred north, then a return to St Joseph’s and the Cambridge Senior Examination, which he passed with a leaning towards botany, geography and the history of Ceylon. The years that shaped him most fell between the ages of twelve and sixteen, when the family lived in Anuradhapura and the boy roamed with a gun through jungle that held leopard, elephant, bear and snake, painting its landscapes in watercolour and drawing in charcoal, pencil, pen and even iron nails, on paper and on walls. Those years bred in him a patriotism and a reverence for the achievements of the ancient masters in the buried cities, so that by 1931, aged seventeen, he had settled his determination to be a painter against his father’s wish that he read medicine.

The making of a painter

Art schools of the modern kind did not yet exist on the island, so in 1932 he entered the Arts and Crafts course at the Ceylon Technical College, whose art section was led by D.J.A. Perera and afterwards by J.D.A. Perera, the founder of the Government College of Fine Arts. Under them he gained command of oils, tempera, watercolour, pastel, black and white, woodcut and lacquer, and of sculpture and pottery besides. In 1935 a wanderlust took him to India and Nepal, where he studied ancient painting, sculpture and the minor arts at first hand and followed short courses at the Madras School of Art and Crafts and the Government School of Art in Calcutta; for years afterwards he pursued the study of Indo-Aryan and Vedic art and its relation to the indigenous styles of his own country. His work carried him in these formative years between Colombo, Anuradhapura and Jaffna, and by 1936 he was assisting his two teachers unofficially and sweeping the important prizes of the Ceylon Society of Arts, with which he had first exhibited in 1933.

His hand was soon wanted beyond the easel. In 1939 he painted ‘The Intercession of St Theresa’, an oil of one hundred and ninety-six square feet, across the ceiling of All Saints’ Church in Borella. Appointment followed accomplishment: Instructor in Arts and Crafts at the Ceylon Technical College in 1942, Assistant Lecturer in Art at the Government College of Fine Arts in 1952, Lecturer in 1955, and, on 1 October 1965, Principal of the Government College of Art and Art Crafts, a post he held until his retirement in 1969.

Recognition reached beyond the island. In 1946 he went as the only delegate for Ceylon to the first All-India Art Conference in New Delhi, inaugurated by Abanindranath Tagore, where three of his works, among them ‘Lokasvada Rathiya’ and ‘Gamanarambaya’, together with the sculpture ‘Apsaras’, were accepted into the non-competitive section of the International Contemporary Art Exhibition opened by the Viceroy, Lord Wavell. In 1949 the government awarded him a scholarship of two years to study Western art in Britain and Europe, and in 1950 he worked for short periods at St Martin’s School of Art and the Central School of Art in London, and then for a full year in the British Museum, before showing that April in the Exhibition of Paintings by Asian Artists in London, alongside painters from China, Pakistan, India, Vietnam and Indonesia.

A passion for variety

What set Abeyesinghe apart was a refusal to repeat himself. Where his contemporaries tended to evoke a single, well-defined image, his own work ranged deliberately across many, and Albert Dharmasiri, his monographer, describes a man who refused to be bound by any one manner and held instead a passion for variety of expression, experimenting with colour and form with great panache and abandoning technique for its own sake in the effort to realise a pictorial concept. His work ranged, in consequence, from portrait realism through to symbol-laden semi-abstraction, and the range was deliberate. The critic writing as Nadun, reviewing his second one-man show in the Ceylon Observer of 2 October 1955, understood the logic of it: Abeyesinghe was ‘much more than a front-rank portrait painter’, for his realistic work had been ‘a series of exercises that laid the foundation for his ultimate abstractions’, and he could ‘be real even as Picasso was a grand realist’. He was a portraitist of real standing on that realist side, and painted, in two days, a life-size portrait of the first Prime Minister, D.S. Senanayake, which hangs today at Senanayake’s old school, S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia.

That authority rested on draughtsmanship of a rare order. The tradition of figure drawing he inherited was founded on plaster casts of Roman marble copies of Greek sculpture, the Apollo Belvedere, the Discus Thrower, the Venus de Milo and the Medici Venus, and it schooled him in anatomy and in the construction of form after the manner of the Old Masters of the West. His knowledge of anatomy gave him, in Dharmasiri’s account, a special insight into the process of figure drawing, and his drawings could deploy an analysis of character while still making an aesthetic statement, the whole a matter of passionate observation that coordinated hand, eye and brain.

The paintings themselves carried the synthesis into subject. In the 1945 exhibition hung ‘Betrayal’, a treatment of Christ and Judas that R.B.T. found touched with pathos; ‘Lakshmi Upatha’, the Hindu goddess of the dawn, whom the same critic saw as ‘a chill figure of the dawn, bathed in Himalayan dew’; the ‘Masked Dancer’ and the ‘Thovile’ drawn from the island’s ritual life; ‘Gadaladeniya’ from its Kandyan architecture; and ‘Fragment’, in which the face of a Sigiriya woman is, in the critic’s phrase, ‘a deliberate piece of transposition trying to chain the far past to the timeless present’. His largest canvas, ‘Samsaraprasnaya’, six feet by three and a half, stood at the centre of the intuitive, symbolical and metaphorical strain of his art, packed, as Nadun read it, with man’s search for perfection and complete release. Martin Wickramasinghe, the foremost Sinhala novelist of the century, reviewed the work in superlatives in Silumina and counted Abeyesinghe an important contributor to the national renaissance, drawing out the Buddhist and Hindu thought that lay behind the images.

Sources of a synthesis

The sources of that art lay on both sides of the world. From his own country came the ancient temple mural and fresco, the painting of Sigiriya and the sculpture of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, the motifs of the Kandyan tradition and the philosophy of the Buddhist and Vedic texts; from India came the Indo-Aryan and Vedic art he had studied on his travels and long afterwards; and from Europe came the modern masters, Picasso, Matthew Smith and Degas among them, held in balance against the Old Masters whose method he had learned from the casts. His teachers D.J.A. and J.D.A. Perera gave him the discipline, and his kinship, in temperament and ambition, was with George Keyt, the one painter of his generation to whom the Forum critic thought him a true counterpart. Out of these he made what Dharmasiri calls a poetic synthesis of the native tradition, alive to the innovations of the West without being governed by them.

Honours came late and fully. In 1991 the University of Kelaniya conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts, honoris causa, on the recommendation of its Institute of Aesthetic Studies, and a UNESCO fellowship carried him to Britain, the United States and Japan. His reach ran well past the easel: he designed the costumes and sets for Chitrasena’s ‘Vidura’ ballet in 1950, took a directing or designing hand in the young nation’s great pageants, the 1948 Pageant of Lanka, the 1959 independence pageant and the 1967 National Heroes’ Day pageant, worked as one of its first modern political cartoonists, and acted on the stage; through the studios he ran passed pupils of the next generation, among them Sushila Fernando before her London years and Walter Kalasooriya. He married the artist Viva Meegama, a pioneering textile designer whom he had first taught at the Ceylon Technical College, and they had two daughters. He died on 5 April 1993, a painter who had begun by drawing the buried cities of his boyhood and ended by giving the modern art of his country one of its earliest and most inventive voices.

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Sources

1. Dharmasiri, Albert. Stanley Abeyesinghe.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
3. R.B.T. ‘Fine Musings in Colour’. Times of Ceylon. 15 November 1945.
4. Nadun. ‘One-Man Show of Paintings’. Ceylon Observer. 2 October 1955.
5. Forum (Indian weekly). 2 March 1947.
6. Wickramasinghe, Martin. Review in Silumina.
7. e-thaksalawa, Ministry of Education, Sri Lanka. Artist record. https://www.e-thaksalawa.moe.gov.lk/web/en/component/k2/item/144-stanley-abeysinghe-1914-1993.html
8. lankapradeepa.com. ‘Stanley Abeysinghe.’ https://www.lankapradeepa.com/2021/08/stanley-abeysinghe.html
9. The Taprobane Collection. Artist record. https://art.taprobanecollection.com/stanley-abeyasinghe-b-1914-1993/