Ivan Peries

Ivan Peries (31 July 1921 – 13 February 1988) was a founder member of the Colombo '43 Group of Sri Lankan artists, and one of its four leading painters, along with George Keyt, Justin Daraniyagala and Harold Peiris. Born near Colombo, he spent more than half his life in self-imposed exile in London and Southend-On-Sea, but his art remained to the end a prolonged meditation on his native Sri Lankan experience.

Peries' subjects, repeatedly rural life and the ocean shoreline, were of 'a world neither ancient nor modern, clearly recognisable, strangely, hauntingly meaningful and yet ultimately outside the natural experience'. The subject of Ivan Peries' paintings, considered alongside his cultural dislocation, have made him an important post-colonial artist, and a key figure in the origins of contemporary Sri-Lankan art.

Peries grew up in Dehiwela, on the Western shore of Sri Lanka, looking towards the Laccadive sea. His father Dr. James Francis Peries had studied medicine in Scotland, and his mother Ann Gertrude Winifred Jayasuria was a graduate of St. Bridget's Convent in Colombo. Ivan's brother Lester James Peries is a leading Sri Lankan film director. The Peries family was a Roman Catholic family that had become anglicized. Ivan was fluent in English from childhood.

Ivan Peries leant towards art as a vocation from a young age, and was a recognised artist by the age of 20. He refused his parents’ offer to take an academic university degree. Photographer Lionel Wendt recommended Harry Pieris as Ivan’s teacher. Harry Pieries became mentor and friend to Ivan. In 1941 Wendt bought Peries’ ‘Homage to El Greco’.

Ivan Peries was part of a community of progressive, intellectual Sri-Lankan artists. They included Justin Daraniyagala, George Keyt, Aubrey Collette, George Claessen, WJG Beling, LTP Manjusri, Richard Gabriel, Walter Witharne, and YJ Thuring.

His character at this time was ‘excited and tense, [acting] on the spur of the moment’. In the early 1940s he was ‘frantically engaged in a shuttle service, meeting one artist or another – Harry, Beling, Collette. He went all the way to Nugedola to meet Justin, then back to Lionel Wendt, who was respected by all’. In 1943, Wendt orchestrated a meeting of the artists along with Harry Pieris, with Ivan doing ‘the spade work’. These few Sri Lankan artists named themselves the '43 Group, after the year. They admired other such groups as the Surrealists and wanted recognition for a style of painting that had many influences but few restrictions, such as had been imposed on them by the Ceylonese Society of Arts.

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