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拍品专文
“Peries is not a painter of fact but of feeling, and even in his most detailed representational scenes the subject of the picture becomes a means by which the artist explores and expresses his own inner feelings as much as those generated by the visual image itself. He reconstructs the elements of a familiar visual experience, usually by a process of simplification, and reassembles them in an entirely personalized way which invests these pictures with their most remarkable artistic qualities; and in this resets what one might call the modernity of these paintings. In them Peries has, so to speak, invented a modern Ceylonese ‘landscape’ art” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987).
Ivan Peries spent most of his career in England, first studying at the Anglo-French Institute at St. Johns Wood School of Art from 1946 until 1949, before returning to London to live in Southend-on-Sea in 1953. His works, especially his landscapes, reveal an escape from the bourgeois, cosmopolitan environs of England and a return to the natural coastal environment of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which he idealized through his art. Peries’s romanticization of the untouched Ceylonese landscape played a key role in the gestation of modernism in Sri Lanka, and the formation of the ’43 Group, which counted artists Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt as members along with Peries himself.
The present lot, Untitled (The Leaning Tree), from a series Peries painted in the 1980s is an example of the deep influence of the Ceylonese landscape on his work. Here, he depicts an environment devoid of humans where the natural elements of the landscape seem to communicate with each other. Peries paints two stately trees as the observers in this work, one of which may be described as the titular ‘leaning tree’, and is perhaps inspired by Yellow Flame trees with their umbrella shaped crowns that are native to Sri Lanka. Through his impressionist brushwork, a sense of motion and movement becomes apparent in the work. The peace and stillness palpable in the foreground are juxtaposed by the tumultuous sky and scattered shadows on the ground.
As art historian Senaka Bandaranayake acknowledged, “Of course, we speak here of movement in a special sense. In keeping with their essentially reflective nature, Peries’ pictures are often static. Whatever movement there is, is entirely internal, underneath, the gestures of a kind of inner spirit of place. This spirit, sometimes highly charged, dramatic, even violent, sometimes quiet, gentle, delicate, almost musical, often – in the best pictures – both things at once, is the most profound experience that these paintings have to offer” (S. Bandaranayake & M. Fonseka eds., Ivan Peries Paintings 1938-88, Melbourne, 1996, p.13).
Ivan Peries spent most of his career in England, first studying at the Anglo-French Institute at St. Johns Wood School of Art from 1946 until 1949, before returning to London to live in Southend-on-Sea in 1953. His works, especially his landscapes, reveal an escape from the bourgeois, cosmopolitan environs of England and a return to the natural coastal environment of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which he idealized through his art. Peries’s romanticization of the untouched Ceylonese landscape played a key role in the gestation of modernism in Sri Lanka, and the formation of the ’43 Group, which counted artists Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt as members along with Peries himself.
The present lot, Untitled (The Leaning Tree), from a series Peries painted in the 1980s is an example of the deep influence of the Ceylonese landscape on his work. Here, he depicts an environment devoid of humans where the natural elements of the landscape seem to communicate with each other. Peries paints two stately trees as the observers in this work, one of which may be described as the titular ‘leaning tree’, and is perhaps inspired by Yellow Flame trees with their umbrella shaped crowns that are native to Sri Lanka. Through his impressionist brushwork, a sense of motion and movement becomes apparent in the work. The peace and stillness palpable in the foreground are juxtaposed by the tumultuous sky and scattered shadows on the ground.
As art historian Senaka Bandaranayake acknowledged, “Of course, we speak here of movement in a special sense. In keeping with their essentially reflective nature, Peries’ pictures are often static. Whatever movement there is, is entirely internal, underneath, the gestures of a kind of inner spirit of place. This spirit, sometimes highly charged, dramatic, even violent, sometimes quiet, gentle, delicate, almost musical, often – in the best pictures – both things at once, is the most profound experience that these paintings have to offer” (S. Bandaranayake & M. Fonseka eds., Ivan Peries Paintings 1938-88, Melbourne, 1996, p.13).