Sybil Keyt

The surname invites an assumption that Sybil Keyt’s career quietly set aside: she was not, by descent, a Keyt of George Keyt’s line, and the sources that record her are careful to say so. Her standing rests on her own footing, in the generation that came up after the founders through Cora Abraham’s art school in Colombo and formed its own company, and in a body of work that travelled from Colombo to Tokyo, London and, in the end, Melbourne.

She was born in 1937 and came to painting through the Melbourne Art Classes that Cora Abraham ran, the studio out of which so much of the island’s later modern art grew. In May 1956 an invitation reached her to hang her paintings alongside the ‘43 Group, and the following year, in May 1957, she was among the founder-members of the Young Artists’ Group, the circle formed from Abraham’s school, with which she exhibited from its inception. The two affiliations placed her at the join between the first modernists and the artists trained in their wake.

The record of her exhibiting years is specific. Her work was included in the Asian Artists exhibition held in Tokyo in 1958, and in ‘Ceylon: A Painter’s Country’, the survey of the island’s painting shown in London in 1960. In 1962 to 1964 she took part in the studio exhibitions held in Colombo alongside Sita Kulasekera, Richard Gabriel, Manjusri and others; in 1967 she showed with Neville Weereratne at the Lionel Wendt Arts Centre; and in 1970 she held a solo exhibition at the Samudra Gallery. She had married Weereratne, the painter who would become the Group’s historian, on 6 June 1959, and her life thereafter ran alongside his account of the movement.

In 1971 the couple left Ceylon for Melbourne, part of the wider dispersal that carried several of the Group’s later members to Australia and England. Her painting continued there, and in 1991 she and Weereratne held a joint exhibition at the Highway Gallery. Work of hers is recorded in collections abroad, the quiet afterlife of a painter whose exhibiting years belonged to Colombo but whose later decades were Australian.

The coincidence of the surname is, in the end, a small thing set beside the record itself: an invitation from the ‘43 Group, a founding place in the Young Artists’ Group, and shows in Tokyo, London and Melbourne, earned in her own name.