Usually his work goes on display in Colombo every three years – but the norm has changed. Two years after the last exhibition, George Beven’s work will once again come into public view on September 2.
“Age,” smiles Beven who reached the three score years and twenty milepost in his colourful journey of life on July 8, adding light-heartedly, “never know when I’m going to drop dead.”
And colour has always been a dominant force in his paintings and as we sit in the home of his friend, Scott Dirckze (a long-time Director of George Steuarts) at Pelawatte after cake and tea, along with the artist’s friend and partner Wolfgang Stange last Tuesday and chat about life, art and death, Beven points out the “blue buffalo painting” which hangs prominently in the hall. Scott had bought that painting at one of the early Beven exhibitions.
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| George Beven |
“Colour, matching of colour, that’s what people call my style,” says Beven after thinking awhile, conceding that his exhibitions never have a theme. He paints what he likes and what he sees. “Painting is not just copying nature. I copy nature in my own style.”
“If the public don’t like, I couldn’t care less. I paint for myself,” he reiterates. But the public does like his paintings, for six of the latest have already been sold, with people visiting the home of author Ashok Ferrey where they are currently being kept, for a peek preview to beat the others before they are displayed at the Barefoot Gallery.
Scenery, portraits, “people I know, my next-door neighbour who is a young man who makes papadam”, and male and female nudes using gouache colour ….40 in all form this year’s exhibition. “There are no Sri Lankan female nudes because it’s difficult to get Sri Lankan ladies to take off their clothes,” laughs Beven.
Explaining to the uninitiated what gouache colours are he says they’re water-based colours, the closest links being with poster colours. They come in tubes and can be used as a water colour or thicker as an oil painting.
Which of the 40 paintings does he like best? He finds it difficult to pick one. “Once finished, I find so many faults, I try to forget it.” But ultimately he does pick one – the nude bust of Irishwoman Nuala. “It is the best because of the colours that I have used.”
The scenes are mainly Sri Lankan with a few of Laos including one in a temple and another “beautiful and stunning” image he would never forget of about 100 monks getting ready early morning to go abegging for alms or pindapatha.
From there, we ramble on to his many visits to temples in Sri Lanka, especially in his hometown Negombo, “to chat and drink ginger tea”, though he is Roman Catholic but very “Buddhist conscious”.
As we traverse down memory lane, this artist of many facets, which include black-and-white photography and tap dancing, draws from a full canvas, and the anecdotes flow forth along with bits of information about his lineage. The ancestors of his father, Lorenz Beven, originally from Gloucester in England, came as soldiers with the British in the 18th century to Ceylon. One of them married a German and settled down here. His mother was Kathleen Wright whose people also came from England and whose father was a doctor. “Father’s family had 19 and mother’s 14.”
Beven studied at Newstead College, Negombo, where his mother taught music, till he was 12 and then moved to Maris Stella College. During his years at Newstead, he also became a child dancer. “Mother was the person who did everything for us,” says Beven who has only one sister, April, younger than he.
It was at Newstead that art teacher Miss Jayawardena encouraged him to paint and sent his entries to art competitions in England, he says with fondness.
But at Maris Stella “painting was a hobby” and in the late 1940s, he sent a couple of line drawings to the Ceylon Observer, to which the Editor of the Women's Pages, Anne Abayasekera, responded, asking him to start work there. He assured them he would do so after his SSC and Lake House did take him on as illustrator and fashion designer. Beven believes he was the first artist any Sri Lankan newspaper employed – with the only thing he didn’t undertake being cartoons, for Lake House had Collette.
“At that time (when Beven was a youth) certain places like the Colombo Swimming Club were taboo for the Ceylonese. There were also no local dancers in the Ceylon Amateur Dramatic Company (CADC). But they took young Ceylonese who could dance for interludes between skits. This group consisted of myself, Romayne Dias, Oosha de Livera and a few others. Rehearsals were at the Swimming Club,” he says but the colour bar of those times didn’t allow them even to have a drink or a shower there.
Lake House, meanwhile, sent him for evening classes at Heywood Art College down Green Path and it was here that his path crossed that of David Paynter from whom he learnt to draw the human figure. Then in 1955 Lake House decided to send him to England, to St. Martin's School of Art to learn fashion drawing and illustration. Back in Sri Lanka, after his stint at art school, though his mother and sister were in England, the last straw was the introduction of Sinhala Only in 1958.
Emigrating to England, Beven couldn't get a job on a newspaper, though he had the experience, because coloureds couldn't be sent to interview whites, thinking that has now changed.
Armed with the skill of shorthand and typing he was able to find only 'temp work' until he finally joined a travel company.
Life as a serious painter began only when he lost his job at the travel firm. “I was 55 but people considered me too old for a job.…only fit for the dust heap,” he says, adding that he then realized that God was telling him something. “I love to paint – God gave me a talent when I was little.”
Back he went to art school. A friend hung his paintings in a London restaurant and people bought them off the walls and requests followed…..including a portrait of Princess Margaret.
All this while, Beven was also developing his own unique style -- to bring out the power and expressions of the human figure and face, came the 'toothbrush technique' called 'monotones'.
When talking about the art of drawing human figures, influenced by David Paynter, there is a tinge of sadness in Beven’s voice. “An Indian who has several of David’s paintings and also mine says he sees a link. David had learnt from an Englishman….there was progression, the Englishman, David and then me. But no one to follow me, I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. I love to teach. Nobody has come forward to give their full mind….. Ladies who learn art learn to draw a bowl of flowers but concentration is not totally on painting. Unfortunate, but that’s how it is.”
Beven who comes three times a year to Sri Lanka and stays two months every time would love to teach if only someone was interested in learning.
So Negombo and London, that’s where he lives. “I’d like to spend my life here, but I can’t afford the hospitals. I do get a government pension but that’s small. In England everything is free – as soon as I passed 60 all medicines were given free, because 33% of my salary when working for the travel firm went for insurance,” says Beven, pointing out that before he came to Sri Lanka last Christmas his foot knocked a paving stone resulting in a fall which fractured his right shoulder and this time too just before he left London he had a violent headache and couldn’t even lie down. They suspected that he had burst a blood vessel, plugged wires all over him, did a lumbar puncture, a battery of tests, the costs of which would have been very dear had he been here.
“This time I’m going back to England in the winter – I hate the cold but Wolfgang has work and the house will be a total mess,” he explains. With Wolfgang he has had a 40-year partnership……. “He’s like my PR and I am like his PR” and it was Wolfgang, dancer, choreographer and teacher of dance who specializes in working with the differently abled, who presented two tasteful books of Beven’s work to him on his eightieth birthday.
When asked what has changed since we interviewed him in his home in Negombo in 2001, Beven’s simple repartee is “only the age but no point in complaining. Age is a state of mind. I feel 30 and sometimes even behave like a 30-year-old idiot”.
Philosophically he argues that when you are born, you have to die. He’s healthy, what more can he ask for. He doesn’t drink or smoke but there are “plenty of other sins”. He leads a life he thinks is good, he’s not envious of others. It is only difficult to bend down and pick up things so he waits until about five things have fallen before bending.
Expressing a wish that if he makes some money he would get hearing aids for some differently abled people in Matara, whom Wolfgang is helping, he says “when I see them I wonder what we have to grumble about”.
With his words that whatever the future brings it doesn’t matter, but he hopes he would drop dead – just not wake up in the morning when the time comes, echoing in our ears we bid goodbye, with one certainty… here is an artist who has reached his full potential, here is also a man who is contented with his lot. What more can one ask for.
The exhibition of paintings by George Beven will be on at the Barefoot Gallery, 704, Galle Road, Colombo 3, from September 2 to 20 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. |
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