Swanee Jayawardene

When Swanee Jayawardene first hung her paintings with the ’43 Group in 1954, it was her light that people named. Fred de Silva of the Times of Ceylon settled on the phrase ‘luminous style’, and the phrase has followed her ever since. She was among the small number of women to become an active member of a movement remembered mostly through its men, and she came to it, like several of her generation, through the classroom rather than the salon.

She was born in 1930, in Moratuwa, the coastal town south of Colombo. Her first training was at the Melbourne Art Classes that Cora Abraham ran in the city, the studio that fed so many of the island’s later painters into the modern movement, and she went on to work under Harry Pieris, the founder-member whose own house would later become the Sapumal Foundation. That lineage, from Abraham’s schoolroom to Pieris’s studio, placed her squarely within the ’43 Group’s second generation.

That luminous manner was only one part of a wider range. Her painting draws Cubist structure and a heavy, deliberate line into bolder and at times darker subject matter, and she worked beyond the easel as well, as a designer and teacher who experimented at length with batik. Her name is given as both Swanee and Swarnee.

Her standing was recognised in the moment. The notice her 1954 showing drew led, the following year, to an invitation to join the ’43 Group proper, and her work is held today at the Sapumal Foundation, the Colombo house that keeps the movement’s core collection under one roof and open to the public. To be hung there is to be counted among the company the Group itself chose to preserve.

Trained under Abraham and Pieris, shown to acclaim in 1954 and made a member the year after, held today on the Sapumal walls, she is remembered above all for the light a critic named seventy years ago.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
3. de Silva, Fred. Times of Ceylon. 1954.
4. The Sapumal Foundation, Colombo.
5. Daily Mirror. ‘The Immeasurable Talent of Swanee Jayawardene.’ https://www.dailymirror.lk/the_weekend_online/The-Immeasurable-Talent-of-Swanee-Jayawardene/426-257974