The Beloved

"Not a naturalistic painter, Peries has been as disinterested in the actual structure of the human figure as in that of a landscape. The figures in these portraits, at first quite carefully delineated and representational, are not much more than objects for particular arrangements of form and colour, so much so that in the later pictures the figures are often faceless, robed silhouettes rather than really identifiable people. In an early picture, The Beloved, 1949, a delicate and sensitive portrait of three girls, the finesse of the artist's perception has captured much more than the merely formal qualities of the subject. And yet, even this picture is more a painting about a painting than a painting about people, a response to the subject generated by an interest in particular aspects of form and colour." (S. Bandaranayake, 'Ivan Peries: the predicament of the bourgeois artist in the societies of the Third World', Field Notes, asiart ARCHIVE e-journal, 2009, accessed April 2015)