Cat Wright
Two eyes gaze blankly, in the centre of the composition, from a bureaucratic figure who sits behind a counter. Electric strip lighting and sign with printed capital letters hang from the ceiling. Two queues stretch ahead. Most face forward; one reads a book, another peers back at the viewer with a mixture of confusion and curiosity. The scene is rendered in Untitled (Unemployment Line) (1972), drawn by George Beven (1929-2023). Although hailed ‘one of Sri Lanka’s leading contemporary artists’ by The Guardian, his work is also an important part of British art history, as the sketch itself testifies to. (1) The image captures the distribution of dole benefits in the UK during the 1970s, a pivotal historical moment: the decade in which post-war social democracy broke down, to be replaced with a neoliberal counterrevolution. (2) Britain was in its most economically equal in 1976, the year an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan imposed austerity measures, ahead of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure from 1979-1990, which would dismantle common wealth and exacerbate social inequalities. (3)
Such collective resources were restricted to even smaller elites, a re-bordering of colonial spoils, justified through rhetorical claims that those regarded as foreign must be prevented from accessing their share.(4) Similar policies and their intended effects also driven by IMP loans, were imposed in Sri Lanka from 1977.(5) Decades later, by 2022 the Indian Ocean island defaulted on its international debt, interest payments for which were larger than the state’s entire education budget, while a mass uprising forced the president to flee.(6) On display at Colombo’s Barefoot Gallery in 2026 to make the launch of The Beven Foundation, Untitled (Unemployment Line) (1972) stands out as the only artwork to represent a specifically British scene, amongst imaginative visions of Sri Lanka. And yet, the drawing speaks to the deep structural connections between the two islands, bonds embodied by Beven’s very life and practice.
Beven was born in Negombo in 1929, the year of a Wall Street crash in the US, which caused an economic depression for Sri Lanka. (7) His life was marked by momentous events: including universal suffrage in 1931, and independence in 1948. Beven would go on to train at Colombo’s School of Art in the 1950s, receiving tutorship from queer artist David Paynter. (8) Whilst working as an illustrator for the Ceylon Observer, the publisher sent him to study at London’s Central Saint Martin’s in 1955-56, where he undertook male life drawing for the first time.(9) Sri Lanka’s first full decade after the end of British rule was marked by increasing ethnonationalism – as the ethnic coalitions and conflicts that had shaped the island’s anti-colonial movements reconstituted themselves through the institutional frameworks and social divisions the UK had bequeathed, laying the foundations for eventual civil war (1983-2009).(10) The two islands continued to be connected after 1948: British mercenaries, with tacit approval of Thatcher’s government, trained Sri Lankan troops during the conflict. (11)
After Beven’s return to Colombo in 1956, the government implemented the Official Language Act, which replaced English with Sinhala as the sole official language of the country, excluding Tamil.(12) Himself a Burgher, of mixed Dutch-Sinhalese ancestry, Beven was one of the many to emigrate in response to this wave of ethnonationalism: relocating to London permanently in 1958 and acquiring British citizenship two years later.(13) He was part of a movement of immigrants from former British colonies who travelled to the imperial core to access the wealth stolen by the empire, the proceeds of which had built the UK welfare state – as evoked in Untitled (Unemployment Line) (1972). (14) But though living in London, Beven’s imaginative world still continued to revolve around Sri Lanka, as is evident in his work.
In 1958, Beven held a solo show at the Royal Empire Society in London, which was met wit critical acclaim.(15) The Glasgow Herald compared the exhibition to French Impressionist art: ‘Beven, from a land famous for its dancers is, in his crayon and ink drawings, an Eastern Degas, catching the grace of Ceylonese ritual postures’. (16) The Halifax Weekly Courier remarked, ‘[h]e is a brilliant draughtsman and a fine colourist. Some of his pictures depict impressive Cingalese [sic] temples, great Buddhas and the splendid ceremonials of the country’, images of which were displayed alongside paintings of Chennai fishermen in Tamil Nadu, created after a trip to South India. (17) For all the British press – in their ignorance – emphasised what they saw as exclusively ‘Sinhalese’ sites, Beven’s vision of South Asia was in fact multi-ethnic: depicting a variety of Hindu and Buddhist rituals, deities, and temples. (18)
Beven’s aesthetic outlook was also internationalist in scope. The drawings he undertook during global travels record important moments of world history: including impressions of China in 1974-75, towards the end of the Community Party’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In Whang Poo (1975), on display at Barefoot Gallery Colombo, delicate black pen lines and grey watercolour wash, outlines a traditional boat, known as a junk ship. The watercraft is depicted sailing along the Huangpu River, which flows through Shanghai. As historical accounts published during or shortly before Beven’s first visit to China explain, fluvial landscape was a site of violent imperial struggles between China and the West for over a century from 1840. (19) Other artworks by Beven consider the dynamics of East Asian cultural exchange with the West, within the context of an early twentieth-century Chinese cultural revival.
Roof Nanjing Museum (1975) sketches architectural details of Nanjing Museum in Jiangsu: a fishtail roof end, modelled on the Tang dynasty Dule Temple in Tianjin. (20) The dynasty Dule Temple in Tianjin.(20) The museum, built between 1936-48, embodied a Chinese modernism: synthesising the nation’s ancient heritage with new methods, in complex dialogue with Western architectural discourses.(21) Sri Lana’s own modernist art movement – founded in 1943 by queer photographer Lionel Wendt – also turned to the island’s deep history to picture a contemporary aesthetic, internationalist in its visual form, and anti-colonial in its intellectual project.(22) Although not a member, such a description could also be attributed in part of Paynter, Beven’s mentor. Both Wendt and Paynter recorded and reimagined Sri Lanka’s landscapes, peoples, crafts, and rituals through capacious practises that ranged from stylistic realism to surrealist visions. (23)
Wendt and Paynter, like Beven, had lived and exhibited in London. (24) Aesthetic connections can be made between their male nudes – Beven’s own rendering exhibited in the group show, The Male Nude: A Modern View (1983) at Homeworks in the city, alongside queer British artist David Hockney. (25) In the catalogue, art critic Edward Lucie-Smith noted Beven’s ‘Singhalese [sic] landscapes and compositions showing dancers’.(26) His introductory essay reflected on effects on the decriminalisation of homosexuality in a series of stages across the UK between 1967-82. Lucie-Smith’s text argued that ‘[t]he advent of Gay Liberation has had an obvious impact on the recent history of the male nude in art’, with a ‘current revival of the male nude’ connected to the ‘partial lifting of the tacit ban on any expression of homoerotic feeling’, although conceding that ‘openly homosexual artists remain rare’. (27)
Wendt, Paynter and Beven do not sit neatly with the boundaries of this narrative. All three crafted a queer aesthetic vision in the UK long before canonical histories of queer British art that draw a border around the 1980s as their starting point, while also troubling established accounts of earlier queer art which treat Britishness as a highly restrictive category.(28) But boundary-crossing is precisely what makes their work so important. Paynter exhibited at London’s the Royal Academy from 1923-40, with a solo show at the city’s Wertheim Gallery in 1936, while Wendt held a solo show at the capital’s Camera Club two years later.(29) The queer aesthetic worlds they built were full of strange visions and imaginative experiments. (30) The creative lineage of Wendt and Paynter’s more otherworldly dreamscapes can also be found in Beven’s abstract works, on display at Barefoot: Untitled (Mystery No. 2) (1988) and Untitled (Mystery No. 3) (1988), both a riot of bold colour and line, slipping and spilling between flesh and form with a wet liquidity, shimmering on the cusp of total dissolution.
Historian Robert Aldrich identifies further connections between all three, noting Bevan’s pictures of women in a temple, monks, rickshaws, a Negombo matriarch and a fisherman, are figures that recall the photographs of Lionel Wendt and the canvases of Paynter. Bevan’s painting of littoral labour in Untitled (Catamaran Workers) (1990s), (n. d), certainly evokes Paynter’s The Fisherman (1931), or Wendt’s Sea Coast Drive (1938) photographed off Negombo. But Bevan also takes a particular interest in the vessel itself with its visual echo of a Wang Poo. In Sri Lanka, catamarans have long been used predominantly in the Northeast, enabling movement between the island and Indian subcontinent for thousands of years, despite British colonial efforts to partition the two territories from the 19th century.(33) Hundreds of years earlier, Portuguese colonisers had converted and relocated Catholic Tamil Paravar fishing communities from Tamil Nadu to Negombo in Sri Lanka. (34).
Fishing in Negombo lagoon persists to this day, as is evident in Bevan’s Untitled (Negombo fishing boat) (1992). Painted in an aqueous aesthetic, workers attend to their catch, caring for a common resource whose ability to provide collective subsistence has long outlived European transformations to the island’s social and environmental landscapes. Nevertheless, Sri Lanka is still shaped by the legacy of British rule in particular. Bound up with much larger changes to ecological systems and gender structures, homosexuality had been outlawed by the British penal code in 1883 for the first time as against the order of nature. (36) Although such legislation was a colonial import, and Sri Lanka has a documented history of what we would now call non-normative genders and sexualities, in recent decades homophobic politicians have claimed that queer people were somehow foreign to the island.(37) Painted in 1994, a year before an expansion of the penal code and the founding of the first LGBTQ+ activist groups, Bevan’s nude, Andre the Brazilian (1994) is an important artefact of the island’s queer histories, one that extends beyond the social divisions and geopolitical boundaries of the nation state, a capacious visual culture that refuses such strictures. (38)
Renewed efforts to decriminalise were made again in 2022-23, alongside a number of queer environmental exhibitions, the final year of Bevan’s life.(39) The mass multi-ethnic protest movement of 2022, which included queer activism and performances, may have been contoured by the social fractures which structured Sri Lanka throughout Bevan’s career, but the uprising also suggested expansive imaginative possibilities for the future of the island. (40) Aldrich argues that Bevan’s practice, though it rarely depicted the civil war which profoundly shaped Sri Lanka during his lifetime, acted as a form of refuge – especially as a queer artist. (41) Artist historian Neville Weereratne finds in such refuge, ‘a powerful empathy with the life of these islanders, the people of Sri Lanka’. (42) But as Andre the Brazilian (1994) powerfully demonstrates, whether it was created in London, like Untitled Unemployment Line 1972) or in Negombo under the British Penal Code – his work is also a key part of UK cultural history. Bevan’s vision ceaselessly crossed borders, making an important and lasting contribution to both British and Sri Lankan art, testifying to the indelible bonds between both islands.
Written by Dr Edwin Coomasaru, a mid-career fellow at Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, lecturer at the University of Bristol, visiting fellow at University College London, and reviews editor for Visual Culture in Britain. He is currently writing a book, Queer Ecologies and Abundant Aesthetics in Sri Lankan Art, 1926 to 2024.
REFERENCES:
- Ellison King, George Bevan Obituary, The Guardian, 2nd April 2023.
- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos.
- Danny Darling, Peak Injustice, 2024.
- Nadine L. Annan. Nadine L. Iyani, Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire, 2020.
- Ambalavanar Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism, 2023.
- Ruwanapura, page nine.
- K. M. D. Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 2005.
- Neville Weeraratne, George Bevan: A Life in Art, 2014.
- Weeraratne and Aldrich.
- Sivanandan, various.
- Phil Miller and Keeny Meany, The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes, 2020.
- K. M. D. Silva, Buddhist Majoritarianism and Ethnocracy in Sri Lanka, 2021.
- Weeraratne, Aldrich, 1998.
- L. N. A., various pages.
- Weeraratna, Aldrich, Weeraratna.
- Weeraratna.
- Weeraratna.
- Aldrich, Weeraratna.
- Stephen Andors, The Docks of Old Shanghai Harbour, 1974.
- Delin Lei, Idealizing a Chinese Style, 2014.
- Lei, various pages.
- Edwin Coomasaru, Queer Ecologies and Anti-Colonial Abundance, in Lina Wentz Salon, 2023.
- Edwin Coomasaru, Strange Evidence and Surreal Visions, 2026.
- Aldrich and Coomasaru, 2023.
- Coomasaru, 2023.
- Edward Lucie-Smith, George Bevan, 1985.
- Edward Lucie-Smith, Introduction: The Male Nude, 1985.
28.Fiona Anderson and Flora Dunster, Theo Gordon and Laura Guy, Introduction: Queer Art in Britain since the 1980s, 2017.
29 Coomasaru 2023.
30 Darling, Coomasaru 2025 and 2023
31 Aldrich
32 Lionel Wendt, Seacoast Drive.
33 Himanshu Prabhat Sray.
34, Chandra R. de Silva, The challenges of writing the histories of localities that were under colonial rule, 2024.
- Chandra R. De Silva, Asha Gunawardena and Paul Steel, the St. Net Fisheries Association of Negombo Lagoon, 2003.
- Coomasaru, 2023, Trans Methods and Shimmer Aesthetics.
- Sandhushara Fernando, Senil Wanachi and Janaka Sex work in Sri Lanka, 2003.
- Sharmal Wijewardene, Jaded Jezebels, Chainsmokers, Gypsies and Ninjas, 2022.
- Arya Rathna, Devana Senanayake, fight to decriminalize same-sex relationships in Sri Lanka, 2025.
- Lars Waldorf and Neelanjana Premathna, awful struggles at the aftermath. 2026.
- Aldrich.
- Weera Ratna.
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Ancestry – English
His life was marked by his father’s cruelty
Talks about lack of and not including “only British scene, didn’t paint war)
