George Keyt

Painter, poet and nature lover

by Tissa HEWAWITARANE

George Keyt was a painter, poet and a lover of nature, all rolled into one. His paintings were spectacular, his poetry were classics and his love for nature was exuberant.

Emerging from Indo-Dutch origins his parents Henry Keyt and Constance Sporule, came of Sri Lankan families well known in the medical and legal professions. He lived in the mountain city of Kandy and enjoyed the triple blessings of rich earth, warm sunlight, and moderate rain.

A few cities in the world were better calculated to feed the eyes of a growing young artist with the wonders of beauty. Kandy was a natural canvas of fertile valleys, and smiling hills with stretches of luscious green paddy fields.

George Keyt was born in Kandy in 1901. He went to Trinity College, Kandy, one of the country's reputed leading schools. The splendour of the ancient hill capital and its Buddhist aura became a powerful and a lasting influence in his teens to provide both the literary and artistic stimulus to his life.

Living close to the Malwatte Vihare, Kandy, (an ancient Buddhist temple) he became greatly drawn towards Buddhism. As a young man he championed the cause of the Buddhist revival.

At first, he lived in many homes in villages in Dumbara valley, first at Ranawana near Hunangoya, then moved to Amunugama, and finally to Sirimalwatte where he built his own house and grew his own home garden. It's here that he lived a simple life with his Sinhalese wife Pillawela Menike.

He had two sons, Premakumar and Sachinkumar, the latter a gifted musician and father's pet. He had a long standing association with an Indian friend Kusum Narayan whom he married later. However, Menike Keyt remained a constant companion throughout many changes of circumstances and passed away. Kusum Keyt shared his life until his end and left for India.

George Keyt first exhibited with Geoffrey Beling in late twenties from time to time and later with Justin Deraniyagala. By this time Keyt had begun to impress the public and the art lovers to understand his artistic style distinguished for their meticulous dignity, realistic poise, secular and religious life in his Kandyan society.

In 1943 he exhibited his work at the inauguration of the '43 Group in Colombo of which he was a founder member. Of those held outside Sri Lanka, the most notable were the Indian exhibitions of 1947, 1953 and 1975 and the London exhibitions of 1954, 1974 and 1982. Many exhibitions of his work have also been held in other European and American centres.

His paintings are to be found in various museums and galleries around the globe as well as in private collections in Sri Lanka. He has had paintings in the Venice and Sao Paulo Bienales, and has been represented in every exhibition of work of contemporary Sri Lankan painters abroad.

From 1938-1940 he had begun his work to do the magnificent murals at the Gothami Vihare in Borella. The first exhibition of his work alone was arranged in India in 1947 while he was living there.

His visits to Tamil Nadu and Kerala in 1939 influenced the Indian traditions in his paintings. About this time his explorations in Hundu mythology and Indian literature led him to close links with the cultural life of India, where he had lived for long and short periods. A meeting with Rabindranath Tagore in the 1930s left a lasting impression. The typically Indian love of life, beauty, passion, spiritual fervour and legend are seldom inconspicuous in his life and work. Keyt's genius, like his generosity, was warm. His paintings were of bright colour, strong contrast of light and shadow, deep reds, strong purples and brilliant blues - these were among his chief characteristics. Above all it was a sweeping and impetuous technique.

George Keyt has also participated in the '43 Group exhibitions organised in Europe from 1952 onwards especially in London and Paris. Thereafter in a series of exhibitions in Europe along with other Sri Lankan painters were kept on display. Once he was commissioned by the Stebun Glass Factory, New York to execute a design for a crystal vase to be exhibited in "Asian Artists in Crystal" in 1956. He has also provided a painting for the large stained glass mural at the Ceylon Pavilion, Expo 67 held in Montreal. In Colombo he was commissioned for a large mural in the new People's Bank building. Later he has done small scale murals in President's House, and the Robinson Club Hotel in Bentota.

George Keyt was without any doubt Sri Lanka's most acclaimed twentieth century painter known throughout the country and abroad, for his expressions of Hindu-Buddhist themes and of Kandyan village life. While he was well-known as a painter, few people were aware that he was a brilliant poet. His fame as a painter has overshadowed his significance as a poet.

His three books of poems, published in Kandy in small editions in the 1930s, entitled the Darkness Disrobed and 'Image in Absence' as well as 24 later poems had been out of print for a long time and unknown to Keyt's admirers.

Once the painter Degas had told the French symbolist poet, Stephane Mallarme, that he had been thinking becoming a poet because he had 'so many ideas' for poems. Mallarme had replied that "poems are made not with ideas but with words". We could consider this statement related to other arts and say "Music is not made with ideas but sounds" or "Dance is not made with ideas but with body movements".

These statements seem to be self-evident. But late 19th century poems (and paintings) were made largely with ideas (or subject matter) as much as or more than with words (or paint) and it was the function of the words and paint to convey these ideas or images transparently so that we are not aware of the words or paint as such. And this tradition persists. Keyt has once said in an interview in my poetry I go by words and phrases, not ideas".

The words and phrases and the further words and phrases these suggest are the material of my poetry".

Here is one of his poems:

I gaze into the sound of a name,

Like flavour in colour, like colour in sound,

Recalling an image in exile,

And I see a great disc in the sky where

Many rings involve the darkening clouds,

And like a come in recession the disc

Resembles a whirlpool

Holding far down without an image in exile.

In Keyt's poem, The flavour, colour, and shape are all manifestations of the image 'in exile' which permeates like an obsession. Every other thought and event and causes are to be perceived in their likeness.

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