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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

The explanatory notes in this e-catalogue are excerpts from the first edition of Lynne Green’s monograph, A Studio Life Front cover: Volcanic Wind, 1994, oil on canvas, 68 x 93 cm

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham A Centenary Tribute

3 August - 5 September 2012

Introduction We are delighted to host a Centenary exhibition of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham who was born in St Andrews, Fife, on the 8th June 1912. After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1937, she moved to St Ives in 1940. Early on she met Alfred Wallis and Bernard Leach, as well as Ben Nicholson, while Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo were living locally at Carbis Bay. Her peers in St Ives include, among others, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and John Wells.

In 1951 she won the Painting Prize in the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall Festival of Britain Exhibition and went on to have her first London solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1952. Four years later she had her first exhibition with The Scottish Gallery beginning a fruitful relationship which lasted right up until her death in 2004. She was included in many of the important exhibitions of pioneering British abstract art that took place in the 1950s. In 1960 Barns-Graham inherited Balmungo House which initiated a new phase in her life. From this moment she divided her time between the two coastal communities, establishing herself as much as a Scottish artist as a St Ives one. She was made a CBE in 2001. Her work is found in all major public collections within the UK and we are thrilled to mark this significant anniversary with an exhibition of specially selected works that represent major developments of her career.

The Scottish Gallery, August 2012 Opposite: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham at Banaloft Studios, St. Ives, 1966 Photographer: Ander Gunn

Grey Sheds, No.1, 1947 oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm In St Ives, Barns-Graham was struck by the quality of light, and consequent clarity of colour and form. She was drawn to the less picturesque buildings and byways of the old town of St Ives. Narrow streets, and the dramatic contrast of light and shadow found there, had the inherent abstract qualities that she always looked for. The critics applauded her less popular choice of subjects. The Western Echo wrote that not the least of her strengths lay in her ‘search after pictorial effects’ in the parts of the town ignored by other artists. The same article praised her originality and simplicity of treatment, being ‘the key notes… combined with a charming colour appreciation.’

Bone Landscape, Zennor, 1949 mixed media on card, 22.8 x 29.8 cm 1949 was an important year for Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. In May she visited Switzerland with the Brotherton family. Her trip to the Grindelwald Glacier inspired a whole series of drawings and paintings focusing on huge variation of form and colour found at the ice-field. On the 8th of October she married David Lewis in St Andrews, fellow artist Peter Lanyon was best man. This drawing, Untitled (Skull Form) shows clear influence from her contemporaries in St Ives such as Robert Colquhoun. Although the juxtaposition of line; sinuous and jagged may hark back to the harsh landscape of the Swiss Alps.

Green Skull 2, 1951 oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm Barns-Graham frequently derived inspiration from the rhythms and sculptural forms found in nature. A horse’s skull is merely the starting point for an elaborate formal geometry, which pursues lines of force (or energy) as they emanate from the central object, while a subdued palette allows the artist to concentrate on establishing the inter-relationship of the rhythmic pattern of echoing forms.

In 1951 Barns-Graham was included in British Abstract Art at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London where a painting from this series was exhibited. The show initiated a lively debate about abstraction versus realism in art.

Black Form on Orange and Blue, 1953 gouache on paper, 29.8 x 50.5 cm ‘The practice of allowing particularised shape or colour to retain a degree of its identity within the constructed image is typical of Barns-Graham’s approach to abstraction during the early to mid 1950s.

Through her reduction of ice or rock to a small number of separate but related shapes, movements and rhythms, Barns-Graham’s paintings become an abstract evocation of the multifaceted nature of threedimensional form, and of the multiplicity of the visual reading of it: symbolic of what she describes as ‘the total experience.’’

Untitled, c.1954 oil on hardboard, 26.5 x 34.8 cm ‘In her desire to express the essence of landscape, Barns-Graham may reduce its structure to the severest of geometries. In the 1950s she produced a number of paintings and drawings of Cornish rock outcrops in which the irregularities of the stone’s surface, the play of light and the resultant shadows, the colours of mosses and lichens, are all rendered as flat areas of colour. The reduction of sky and sea to flat planes of colour further accentuates the shallowness of the picture space.’

Cork on Sand, 1963 oil on paper on hardboard, 58.5 x 91.5 cm ‘I want my work to be a simple statement. To have an atmosphere and integrity – this is a presence… To have interesting space relationships, relationships of colour and vice versa. One plane over the other in a totality of image – of small area against large masses.’

‘The textured surface in Cork on Sand has been created by transferring paint from small cork tiles. A relationship between forms has been asserted through colour progression, and in formal juxtaposition: as a given colour’s tone moves sequentially from light to dark. Her repeated use of a stamp, bearing a single application of paint, generated increasingly ghostly forms. There is a contrast between the sense of weight and depth in the squares and the lightness of the flat backdrop against which they perform their acrobatics.’

Zoom, 1971 oil & acrylic on hardboard, 58.5 x 81.2 cm ‘In the paintings that employ the disc or circle, like Zoom, everything is carefully calculated, as is the combination and relative amounts of primary colours, red and green, blue and yellow.

The position of each circular unit, so painstakingly measured, activates the area that surrounds it. When two or more circular units are in close juxtaposition a dynamic energy is instantly created between them that affect the intervening space: their positioning implies distance, direction, relationship.’

Music of the Sea, 1976 oil, pen & ink on card, 15.5 x 15.5 cm ‘For an artist who had no difficulty in pursuing a severe abstraction in paint, while continuing to delight in rendering the world in line, the two activities were never opposites.

In a unique series of drawings begun in the mid 1970s, invention and observation, painting and drawing activities came together. The initial inspiration for the series was the rhythmic movement of the sea, and in this work her facility with line took on a new dynamic, and essentially abstract persona.’

Underwater Shadows oil, pen & ink on card, 16.3 x 21.5 cm ‘Her ability to render with an economy of line the complexities of natural form is no better demonstrated than in the series of drawings that took as their starting point the endless movement of the sea.’

Volcanic Wind, 1994 oil on canvas, 68 x 93 cm ‘Having lived for more than half a century in intimate proximity to the sea and to the wild beauty of the Cornish and Scottish landscapes, Barns-Graham could not help but be fascinated and awed by the power and mood swings of nature.

Volcanic Wind meditates on violence and ferocity: there is a vigour and panache that echo the subject’s wildness. Barns-Graham described the work as a ‘devilmay-care painting’ in which soft, free forms move through space defined by an armature of charcoal and paint lines.’

Ocean 3, 2000 acrylic on paper, 57 x 76 cm ‘However absorbed Barns-Graham is in the dialogue between her materials and her imagination, what goes on outside the window proves irresistible to an artist who is captivated by the beauty of the world. Work of this period is often a direct response to the pleasures of colour and movement on the beach below her St Ives studio: the activity of figures about to run into the sea may become a construction of oblongs or stripes, moving across the picture plane.’

White and Orange on Blue, 2003 acrylic on canvas, 20 x 25 cm “In my paintings I want to express the joy and importance of colour, texture, energy and vibrancy, with an awareness of space and construction. A celebration of life — taking risks so creating the unexpected.”

(Barns-Graham, October 2001)