GEORGE CLAESSEN (1909-1999)

Like his contemporary and friend Claessen, Peries spent most of his career in London, first studying at the Anglo-French Institute at St. Johns Wood School of Art from 1946 until 1949 before he returned to London to live in Southend-on-Sea in 1953. However, "In spite of having spent a major part of his life as a painter abroad, there is nothing in his work which is outside the Ceylonese experience, nothing which displays a distance in subject, style or attitude from Ceylonese life or Ceylonese modes of feeling[...] It is the work of a singular and original creative mind nurtured throughout two decades abroad by the lasting experience of a distant homeland." (S. Bandaranayake quoted in, N. Weereratne, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Art in Sri Lanka, Melbourne, 1993, p. 119)

In this painting from 1966 Peries adopts a style he developed using the palette knife to create thick, textured impastos. "This juxtaposition of movement and stasis - and in his best pictures, a dynamic equilibrium between the two - remains the central experience of Peries's work, investing each picture with a profound intensity of feeling." (S. Bandaranayake and M. Fonseka ed., Ivan Peries Paintings 1938-88, Melbourne, 1996, p. 9)

This work was painted just a few years before his death in 1988, and is part of a series of figurative paintings produced by washing away the acrylic from the paper to leave behind the saturated areas of pigment. His figures are serene, composed and isolated, in a state of perpetual reflection showing the influence of the art of fifteenth century monastic artist Fra Angelico whose work we had great affection for. Peries's figures throughout his oeuvre imbue a nostalgic melancholy reflecting an artist geographically disconnected but spiritually intertwined with his homeland of Sri Lanka.