Page 52 - Eye of the beholder

GeorGe keyT
• Great artists often reinvent themselves multiple times in the course of their careers. Many, like Picassopass through various phases before they find an idiom of expression that they stick with for the rest of their lives.
• George Keyt started painting at the age of 26, and quickly went on to be recognized as Sri Lanka’s most famous painter. In a career spanning 66 years, he left behind a prolific corpus of paintings that show his genesis through different styles and themes. Great artists reinvent themselves multiple times through the course of their career before they settle on a permanent idiom of expression. Such was the case with George Keyt, as the two paintings illustrated here clearly show.
• Keyt’s work has fascinated me since the beginning of my collecting career. They have an ‘Indianness of spirit’, yet an appeal that transcends national and cultural boundaries. Most of his canvases are in large format, which enhance their presence and appeal. The subjects are quintessentially Indian, wven when they are generic in theme. The skin tones of the men, the lushness of the tropical vegetation, the doe eyes of the women, the banana leaves and the bamboo shoots – all these lend an unmistakable sense of cultural identity to the paintings.
• Most of Keyt’s early works lack the angularity characteristic of cubism that is apparent in his later works. The figures are often in earthy tones, and in this phase of his career Keyt uses the curvature of the figures to convey a sense of motion. As he progresses in his career, a certain angularity becomes apparent in the figures. The angularity becomes more pronounced in his later works, where cubism induced distortion of the figures is also more pronounced. Another characteristic of Keyt’s canvases is that his compositions are ‘tighter’ om his earlier works compared to his later ones. A comparion of the two paintings adjacent to each other clearly illustrates how Keyt’s composition becase ‘loose’ over the years – probably also due to age related difficulties in painting large canvases.
• Keyt’s fame started rising during his lifetime, and has been on an ascendant ever since. Today, his works have a broad collector base internationally and command high prices in auctions. In as far back as I can remember, not a single work by him has gone unsold in auctions. Art investment handbooks and manuals list Keyt among the very few investment grade Sounth Asian artists at an international level.
46