Sushila Fernando

Among the canvases the ’43 Group carried to Cambridge in 1955 hung one by a newcomer, Sushila Fernando, and it drew a candid line from Aubrey Collette, a founder of the Group: her work, he wrote, was ‘well composed’ and displayed ‘some incredibly lovely colour’, though its ‘over-abstracted forms lacked human interest’ in spite of ‘solid draughtsmanship’. That single verdict, praise and reservation held together, is much of what the record now preserves of her, and it places her exactly. She entered the island’s first modern movement as one of its younger abstractionists, at a moment when the founders were already established men and the Group was carrying Ceylonese painting to England.

She came to that wall by a considered route. She learned first in Colombo, in the studio of Stanley Abeysinghe, who taught much of the post-independence generation, before going on to the St Martin’s School of Art in London, so that her formation ran, as several of the Group’s did, from the island to the metropolis and back. Her painting was abstract, built on the delicate palettes of colour that Collette noticed, and it belonged to the strain of the Group that pressed furthest from the figure.

What survives of her beyond the exhibition record is chiefly the work itself. Her painting hangs in the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo, the house Harry Pieris gave over in 1974 to hold the Group and the artists around it, which keeps her among the company she showed with. The dates of her life and the fuller shape of her career have not come down through the public record, and it would be false to invent them; she stands instead as one of the Group’s younger women abstractionists, documented in her training, her medium and her place on the wall at Cambridge, and left otherwise to the archive.