Lot 8: Untitled (Leaning Trees)

Ivan Peries (1921 - 1988) Untitled (Leaning Trees) initialled and dated 'IP 82' (centre right) oil on card mounted on board 25 x 40½in. (63.5 x 102.9cm.) Painted in 1982

Acquired directly from the artist by a private collector.
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner.

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Sri Lankan artist, Ivan Peries, was a founder member of the 43 Group along with George Keyt, George Claessen, Richard Gabriel, Aubrey Collette, and Manjusri Thero. Their 1943 manifesto sought to marry Western Modernism with indigenous contexts - ideals later adopted by India's Progressive Artist Group in 1947. Peries' evocations of the coastal fishing villages and landscapes from his native country reached a high point of development between the mid-1950s and 1960s.

In 1982, Ivan Peries started a process of distillation through his previous works and began a significant modernisation into an extensive series of large works in oil, familiarly known as the Two Tree or Leaning Tree paintings. Departing from his customary Sri Lankan sea and landscape motifs, the subject of these works consists of two trees on a gently undulating slope, forming a narrow and erect tree on the right and a rounded tree on the left, with its trunk leaning at a sharp angle to the ground and an opposed branch at right angles to the trunk. The pictures divide into two large counterpoised spaces of curving landform and rectangular sky, with the trees traversing and dominating the spaces. The trees themselves vary considerably in shape, colour and internal details: the narrower tree on the right is sometimes a simple, rigid form, sometimes animated and mobile; the more elaborate 'leaning tree,'’ with its forked trunk and patches of light, is the most expressive element in each picture, its complex rounded form echoing the tensions of land and sky. Movement, feeling and philosophical vision are generated as much by the varying relationships and tensions of this compositional architecture as by the colour variations, paint quality and plasticity of the heavy pigmentation. These pictures combine in an entirely new way, Peries’ previous preoccupations with order and underlying movement and his integration of controlled and surging emotion.

This seminal series of more than twenty works in the artist’s oeuvre vividly demonstrates Peries’ technique of producing variations on a theme each, individually a masterful composition and yet at the same time, combined, a window into the artist'’s mind and experience. They are a true representation of a facet of his art which, similarly to the work of many younger contemporary painters in the latter part of the twentieth century, requires a set of pictures, developed as a series, to be viewed collectively as a single work. Despite the applicability of this nature to many of Peries’ seascapes and acrylics, it has particular relevance to the Leaning Tree pictures.

The genealogy of these paintings recalls important aspects of Peries’ career. They harken to the 'expressionist' ’landscapes, of which two of the earliest are The Pink Gate (1944) and Thirusevana (1945); and to works with English themes, such as Oxfordshire Landscape (1966). More specifically, three paintings dating from the late seventies â€" Ambalama (1978), Moonscape (1979) and Nuwara Eliya (1979) contain the beginnings of the Leaning Tree theme. The Leaning Tree pictures constitute a new departure in Peries’ work as well as a summation of and testament to a fifty-year preoccupation with landscape and emotion.
(S. Bandaranayake and M. Fonseka, M. Ivan Peries Paintings 1938-88, Colombo 1996, p. 20)