Books
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| Wonderful
fusion of bygone days Donald Friend loved Ceylon. He had met Bevis Bawa on a boat from England, and come for a week and stayed for five years. Both Donald and Bevis were amusing, sometimes extremely funny and intelligent, and they shared a sense, even a love, of the absurd. Bevis was languid and laid back, like one imagines a 17th century French aristocrat - in the mural picture on page 15 of the book one sees him languishing on a long chair fanned by servants. Donald was furiously curious and observant and he instantly translated what he saw, or thought he saw, into drawings and paintings. He worked from eye to hand in a flash. He once said to me, with precision: "I am an artist, like a dog is a dog". He was also amusingly malicious. I first met him, slightly drunk, at an upcountry party, where he had found the hosts' 17th century 'Knox: Ceylon’ and was sitting in a corner making lewd illustrations to the text in the margins. Like Gaugain on his Pacific island Donald lived in a shack on Bevis' rubber estate near Alutgama and worked furiously all the time. He loved the beauty and drama of everything around him, he loved the feeling that nobody in Ceylon ever had more than one foot on the ground at a time, he loved the enormous plants, the village architecture, the teeming village life, the physical elegance of villagers and fishermen going about their work, the birds hooting, and the ever curious village boys. Out of this absorption in the physical beauty and fascination with what he saw around him, came a huge outpouring of marvellous works of art, some of the best in his long life as an artist. The catalogue for the recent exhibition organised by the Australian High Commission at John Keells: "The Art of Donald Friend, Ceylon" is a glorious book on Friend's work in Ceylon. It is beautifully produced and brings back the full splendour of his art, the richness and throbbing life in his pictures of the myriad people who populate the towns and houses, and the wonderful fusion of fact and fantasy that was life in Ceylon as we saw it in those more innocent and optimistic days. Donald was lucky, as I was, to have fallen into a group of gifted and amusing people. Bevis' brother Geoffrey Bawa, Barbara Sansoni and later Laki Senanayke and Ismeth Raheem, were all serious artists and architects having a great time. United in shedding the drearier side of the colonial past and exposing the real spirit of Lanka that was alive and well all around us. I have one personal comment. Not that it matters for Donald or his art, but it does matter to me and to historical accuracy. I felt that in Donald Friend we had among us a great artist. He was having a hard time and was completely broke, living off Bevis Bawa’s generosity. It was I, and not Geoffrey as the catalogue claims, who spent considerable effort to convince clients to buy Donald's pictures for the houses Geoffrey and I designed, or to commission mural paintings for larger buildings. In some cases I incorporated a sum of money in the building budget for "contingencies" and when it was un-spent, spent it on "decoration" by Donald, with the client’s permission. This was more or less the case for the first and fabulous mural at Baurs’ entrance, and the large story-telling painting of Galle (a century before the tsunami), and the other pictures done for the entrance of what was then the P&O Line office at Mackinnon, Mackenzie. It was also the case for what I believe is one of the great un-executed works of art of our time, a 60 metre long by 9 metre high mural (of which the maquette still exists) for Baurs’ warehouse in Grandpass. This catalogue/book shows what a goldmine of happy and life enhancing art Donald Friend created in Ceylon. Each of the murals alone could almost be the subject of an illustrated publication, and since nothing lasts forever, one must hope that this book will inspire a Sri Lankan or an Australian publication of all the surviving works of Donald Friend in Sri Lanka. (Ulrik Plesner was Geoffrey Bawa's partner from 1959 to 1967, and worked with Barbara Sansoni, Laki Senanayake and Ismeth Raheem finding and measuring historical works of architecture in Sri Lanka). Architectural
fantasy Friend's engagement with this group and others in the architectural profession lasted almost 25 years, extending from his chance meeting with Bevis in 1949 to his work with Geoffrey in Bali in the early 1970s. In numerous collaborative projects, he contributed his paintings and sculptural work within the context of architectural and landscape design. One of Friend's early tasks after moving to Sri Lanka in 1957 was to assist in the architectural renovation of the state-owned Bentota Rest House along the south west coast of Sri Lanka. He and Bevis Bawa designed and produced statues, garden furniture, fountain sculpture and a range of artifacts to adorn the newly landscaped garden of this sea-side resort. Designs of cast concrete slabs in relief or engraved were used as table-tops. Incised clay tiles in various decorative designs were fired in kilns for use on walls, floors and tabletops. It was a seminal project. Although the Rest House was subsequently demolished to make way for the Bentota Beach Hotel, designed by Geoffrey Bawa, the basic concepts and materials of many of these sculptured items produced by Bevis Bawa and Donald Friend, continue to be used by today's generation of architects and have been incorporated in many contemporary buildings, particularly in Asia. Geoffrey Bawa and Ulrik Plesner arranged commissions for the Australian artist with their clients. The large gold leaf painting of Galle, now displayed in John Keells' headquarters, was produced under a commission arranged by Geoffrey Bawa, who also specified the thematic content of the artwork to be executed. The painting is a perceptive study of the urban topography of Galle and is a faithful rendering of important landmarks and buildings. Friend's studies of frescoes, sculptural friezes, Buddha statues and ancient temples, recorded during his innumerable sketching tours throughout Sri Lanka, were skilfully incorporated in his paintings. His work also contains allusions to personalities of an earlier era, such as the figure of Captain F. Bayley, the former manager of the P & O Company in the latter part of the 19th century, peering through a telescope in the right of foreground of the City of Galle painting. The City of Galle, said to be Friend's finest painting, was commissioned by the shipping firm McKinnon Mackenzie & Co., which was formerly based in Galle. On 4 April 1961, Friend noted in his diary: "I've been working intensely and at a great pace nearly everyday from early morning until the light fails, on the big (12' x 4') panel of the mural. It comes along well. An elaborate and detailed subject - a sort of architectural fantasy of the walled fort of Galle with the harbour full of sailing ships, the sky in gold leaf." In the Baur & Company headquarters in Fort, a mural of rural scenes of a small town bazaar was initiated by Plesner during an interior decoration project for his Swiss clients in 1960. The town depicted in the mural is supposedly Aluthgama, not far from 'Brief', in a surreal setting. In later years, the roles were reversed when Friend visited Sri Lanka in 1971 and 1973 to commission Geoffrey Bawa, then a senior partner of the architectural firm Edwards Reid and Begg, to prepare plans for his resort development project 'Batujimbar' in Bali. Friend's influence is evident in the drawing techniques of the 'Batujimabar' brochure produced by Geoffrey Bawa's assistants, which was used successfully for the marketing of the beach houses in Bali. This was an inspirational period for the young Sri Lankan architects, designers and draughtsmen who worked in Geoffrey Bawa's studio. The excellence of Friend's pen and ink drawing technique was a sort of benchmark and style which many of us tried to emulate. Ismeth Raheem graduated as an architect from the Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, in 1969. He worked for Geoffrey Bawa for over ten years, during which time he became acquainted with Donald Friend from whom he learned the technique of laying gold leaf on painting. Observing
and capturing the passing human scene with detached sense of humour But there, beyond the library, was a recreation room with a Billiard's table and like a magnet he found himself drawn to it. His instinctive skill at this game soon made him the champion in a Billiards tournament, but at the A Level examination he had obviously miscued the ball. But these twists and turns in his early days appear to have left him with a mischievous gleam in his eye, which he has put to very good use as a journalist.Though his father, J.L. Fernando, was a journalist and held office as CEO at Lake House, he didn't wish to push him into this same field. However, he found him a job in the administration section of Lake House. His father's reputation as the Saturday political commentator of the Daily News was not held too high in the family. His mother, says Nalin 'had a sense of humour not to take the Saturday Lyre too seriously.' That's a relief to know that his family did not take the man who trod on a lot of political toes in the early days of our independence too seriously either. This collection, which gives a range of his journalistic skills, shows him as a smart young crime reporter, an entertaining writer of travelogues and a percipient observer of the passing human scene with a detached sense of humour and tolerance. He spent nearly three years in California doing menial jobs while his wife was doing a teaching job at Berkeley College, University of California. This gave him a chance of writing back home a series of articles under the heading Letters From America and also a ride through cowboy country (a schoolboy dream) when his wife moved to El Paso as a Visiting Professor of History at the University of Texas. But, unlike the cowboys of Hollywood, he was not doing it seated on a Cayuse but on a pick-up truck while living on his wife's earnings. How similar, he thought empathising with the less fortunate, was the way of his own life with that of a poor jobless Mexican in the States. The year he spent in the desert town of El Paso he did a variety of small jobs like writing 'copy' for an advertising agency, writing a brochure for the US army in El Paso and working behind a bar. He was far from happy he says in that country for lack of a permanent job and when he finally did get a green card he, not so surprisingly, though, returned it, as he says in his own words - ''apparently the only person in the world and certainly the only person from Sri Lanka to do so." As I said earlier, that gleam in his eye gives him a special insight into the vagaries of human nature. This is very visible in his piece on the corrupting influence of English Nursery Rhymes. Though you and I would have recited these jingles a hundred times or more it has never struck us what a dreadful influence they could have easily become if we ever paused to ponder over them. Now that Nalin has shown the way one has to tread cautiously even talking about them, far from introducing these to our children. And to think that Western vacillation grew out of this stew of violence - thieving and cruelty glorified by these nursery rhymes is a disturbing thought. His observations on people and places abroad whether in San Francisco (that "Heavenly City of the Bay") or in Glasgow or in Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, show many similarities with them and us. After two weeks in Ireland, he writes, "I realized, whether it be Dublin or rustic Roscommon, nowhere would I find a nation so aristocratically indifferent to the hurry and scurry of modern life. I thought it was only in Ceylon that people put off things until tomorrow. They thrive on it in Ireland". He holds the people of San Francisco with the same regard - the spirit of friendly humanity prevails there too he says. For instance, a millionaire walking down the sidewalk of a financial district would toss a half dollar into an outstretched hand of some down and out asking not for change to buy some bread but to buy a bottle of cheap wine. A parallel story tells how the wicked police had charged an 84- year- old man for playing a pin ball machine and winning 7 dollars. A leading criminal lawyer appearing free for the old man got him off by quoting a maxim in Latin, de minimis non curat lex meaning the law does not punish the trivial. With added piquancy he put his plea into a limerick: There was a young lawyer named Rex/ With a diminutive instrument of sex/ Charged with indecent exposure/ He pleaded with composure/ De minimis non curat lex. On the Jury accepting the plea the reporter concluded his case, "Once again, San Francisco justice and humour had contributed to achieve a shinning victory". Of interest to cricket buffs may be what he calls a "historical record" of the 1984 Test match at Lords, particularly of the change of face that took place on the faces of the "gin and tonics" as he calls the pavilion crowd, towards the end of an exciting match. On that penultimate day when he was rubbing shoulders with the "gin and tonics" the "gurus" of cricket were being drubbed by their Lankan disciples into a certain defeat. But on the following day he found that the ''gin and tonics" were missing when the last rites were being performed. A word of caution to old time readers. Most of the pages in this little book are awash with premium Scotch, Old Stuff and tequilas with salt on the rim. Nalin, a connoisseur of food and drink cannot help leaving his mark with exciting comments on both. No wonder I felt groggy, half way through the book. Fascinating
portrait of an artist’s life The range of paintings portrays joyful expressions, sad and sombre feelings and contemplative ones. It is as difficult to choose a favourite painting from her varied collection as to choose a favourite piece of music from your favourite composers. Yet one painting that has fascinated me much is "The Meal", a portrayal of the Last Supper. She departs from the conventional western dinner table image to a Middle Eastern one in attire, furnishings and the meal itself. Surely a more realistic portrayal that captures the original scene more genuinely? However the unique contribution of her paintings is not in their realism, it is in their ability to carry us to a world of supernatural charm; another vision of an imaginative world of beauty and fantasy. Her paintings transport us into another reality: a world of mysticism and magic. It is a world in which she fuses extraordinary colour combinations and a multiplicity of shades. Her religious themes are blended and woven in a fabric of eastern philosophical reflections. Johnathan Bonk, the Director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center, that published this work, has said in the preface to the book " Nalini offers us, through her art, the gift of peace. Her paintings help us to see through the eye. Simple, yet profound; direct, yet subtle; evocative, yet uncluttered; serene, yet dynamic: her art offers those who have eyes to see colour without garishness, spirituality without vacuity, invitation without coercion." Nalinni’s autobiography of sixty pages is unique. It is the unravelling of her life in a series of stories some of which have the flavour of fairy tales. A little girl plays the piano hopefully unnoticed by her parents. Her father comes behind her stealthily and listens to her playing. Next day he brings home the very best piano that could be bought. One is at once reminded of Mozart. Those who are acquainted with Nalini know of her love for stories. The nurture of this goes back to her childhood when she listened to her Amme's stories. This is captured beautifully when she asks her Amme, her storyteller, to tell a story that never ends. She obliges. The black ant goes up and down the red rice mountain. Nalini sleeps. The Amme kisses her little feet to bid good night. This surely is the influence that makes her a fascinating storyteller. It is indeed a unique autobiography: a series of stories of her life that moves from Matara to Mount Lavinia and to Israel, Japan, US and many more. This book is indeed a celebration of her life and work. It is a time for singing. It is the witness of a life devoted to capturing the beauty and mystery of life. |
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