Beven’s back
Beven is back with a flourish of colour to bring to “life” the ordinary man on the street……..the youth who works in the shoe-shop and the trishaw driver who looks for fares close to his home in Negombo. Yes, George Beven, the octogenarian painter who spends his time between England and Sri Lanka will display his works of art, more than 35, at the Barefoot Gallery this September.
Beven: Loves the range of people in Sri Lanka. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Slightly less steady of mien than when we interviewed him last in August 2009, 84-year-old Beven, is high of spirit and quick of repartee when we chat with him on Tuesday at the Barefoot Café. “I am a very lazy painter,” he smiles, when asked why his norm has changed, for usually he holds an exhibition at least once every three years. This time round though, it is four years.
I love to paint, he hastens to add, but repeats that he has become a lazy painter. Beven does like to paint people, because each and every one has different features……..“so it’s nice to paint people and I don’t care what nationality they are, the wonderful thing about Sri Lanka is that it has a range of people”.
Visiting Sri Lanka, his second home, three times a year at Easter, in August and once again at Christmas because his friend and partner Wolfgang Stange, dancer, choreographer and teacher of dance who specializes in working with the differently-abled, gets time off then from his busy schedule, Beven not only paints what takes his fancy here but also back in England where his easel is in the studio on the top floor of their home, even though it may be cold outside.
Here in Sri Lanka, at his home in Negombo, “when I try to paste brown paper around the wet paper, it gets scrunched up because of the heat,” grumbles Beven. Gouache colours or water-based colours (linked closely to poster colours) are what this “people’s artist” but also recluse indulges in, to bring startlingly to life the people he paints – ordinary people and village life with a still-life work throw in here and there. It is his intriguing use of colour that has brought him a call from the Kaethe Kollwitz Museum in Berlin, Germany, to hold an exhibition at its gallery next year.
Having moved away from commissioned monotones or toothbrush paintings, of the rich and famous including Princess Margaret, dancers Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn and Mikhail Baryshnikov and celebrity stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, James Dean, Veronica Lake, Bianca Jagger, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, he, however, mentions that Anoma Wijewardene, an artist in her own right, is “terrified about a picture” that he has painted of her. She has not seen it but I’ve used “her type of colours”, he says chuckling over a portrait of Sunethra Bandaranaike that he did which when hung in her home people referred to as that of “Mr.” Bandar-anaike.
Amidst the mirth, however, there is a recurrent regret, as he wonders whether the art of drawing human figures which he learnt from David Paynter who, in turn, had learnt it from Englishman Glyn Philpot will end with him.
“No one wants to learn,” sighs Beven, adding, “I’m not teaching anyone, because no one wants to learn”.
Philpot, Paynter, Beven…..will the legacy end, is on our minds as we bid him goodbye.
‘Heritage’, an exhibition of paintings by George Beven will be opened by stage and screen star and Founder of the Abhina Academy of Performing Arts, Anoja Weerasinghe, at the Barefoot Gallery, 704, Galle Road, Colombo 3, on September 5 at 7.30 p.m.
The exhibition will remain open till September 29, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays.