[1] Born near Colombo, he spent more than half his life in self-imposed exile in London and Southend-On-Sea, but his art remained to the end a prolonged meditation on his native Sri Lankan experience.
Peries' subjects, repeatedly rural life and the ocean shoreline, were of 'a world neither ancient nor modern, clearly recognisable, strangely, hauntingly meaningful and yet ultimately outside the natural experience'.
[2] The subject of Ivan Peries' paintings, considered alongside his cultural dislocation, have made him an important post-colonial artist,[3] and a key figure in the origins of contemporary Sri-Lankan art.
His father Dr. James Francis Peries had studied medicine in Scotland, and his mother Ann Gertrude Winifred Jayasuria was a graduate of St. Bridget's Convent in Colombo.
Professor Qadri Ismail postulates that: ‘The problem with Ivan Peries was that he could not be dismissed with a convenient critical phrase or be put out of the way with an easy tag.
There is stark realism in the anxiety with which the family awaits the return of the men gone out to sea.’[8] Looking through Peries’ process in his works, according to Prof. Ashley Halpe, ‘gives one a richer sense of the complexity of cultural being in a post colonial context and helps to define the heroism of the artist’s triumph over disjuncture and psychic disturbance, enhancing, if that were possible, the capacity of the paintings.’ Ivan and his wife Veronica (née) Perry (m. 1955) settled in Southend-on-Sea, with their four children.
Now in his full maturity, yet sufficiently removed in time to have absorbed and digested his experience, Peries has completely mastered his vision and his material.’[9] ‘Like every painter, Peries learned from others: Piero della Francesca, Angelico and El Greco, Matisse, Cézanne and many more', say Senake Bandaranayake and Manel Fonseka in their essential account;[10] and even from some who didn’t paint, like Lionel Wendt, postulated Professor Qadri Ismail.