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.

Sources give her birth as 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.

The luminous manner that de Silva praised in 1954 was, on the evidence of the work, one strand of a wider reach. Her painting is described as drawing 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 appears in the record 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.

The firm points hold: a training under Abraham and Pieris, a luminous debut in 1954, membership from 1955, though her estate dates it to 1954, a practice that ran from oil into batik, and a place on the Sapumal walls. The light a critic named seventy years ago is still the truest thing in her work.