Art<\/a>. \u201cShe had a single-mindedness,\u201d Norris says. \u201cShe didn\u2019t see any limitations, she just saw the path ahead.\u201d It\u2019s a focus you can sense in her 1945 oil painting Froth and Seaweed. Painted in her beloved St Ives, the artist homes in on the spidery tendrils of algae and slithery copper rock. \u201cIt\u2019s almost as if she has no peripheral vision, she\u2019s just seeing beauty at her feet.\u201d<\/p>\nBarns-Graham in Cousins\u2019 A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. Photograph: Publicity image<\/p>\n
Film-maker Mark Cousins first encountered Barns-Graham\u2019s paintings in late-80s Edinburgh. Whether depicting the silvery shorelines of St Ives and St Andrews or the crystalline glaciers of Switzerland, he says, \u201cshe just leapt off the walls\u201d. He made a pilgrimage to her St Andrews house during lockdown, and in 2024 released A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, which delves into the artist\u2019s distinctive gaze and synesthesia. Barns-Graham associated colours with people, places, emotions and even letters of the alphabet \u2013 something she called a \u201ctotal experience\u201d. \u201cIf we think of Turner\u2019s relationship to landscape, he saw a vortex. And Leonardo da Vinci saw a machine. She was like that as well; she saw a living thing,\u201d Cousins says.<\/p>\n
Glacier Knot, 1979. Photograph: \u00a9 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/p>\n
Her encounter with the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland came in 1949. \u201cThat day was almost like a rebirth, a kind of rapture,\u201d Cousins says of her life-defining hike and the 60-odd paintings and drawings that followed over a three-year period documenting the glacier\u2019s \u201cmany moods\u201d. In a letter to the Tate in 1965, she wrote: \u201cIt seemed to breathe!\u201d This wasn\u2019t an artist above the landscape, Norris says, but of the landscape. The glacier\u2019s interiority was her interiority \u2013 a close symbiosis that intensified for the rest of her life as she pushed further into abstraction, moving away from figurative landscape painting in favour of \u201csystems, rhythm, repetition and spatial tension\u201d.<\/p>\n
Yet the underlying presence of nature was still there: \u201cbird flights, dancing diamonds on water, dots inside foxgloves, cell formations,\u201d Norris writes. For the curator, Barns-Graham\u2019s work in the 1960s-70s (titled Things of a Kind in Order and Disorder) is where she truly pioneered a new way of experiencing the world \u2013 \u201clike chaos theory, really\u201d \u2013 by laying out small cardboard squares in neat rows on her studio floor before randomly nudging them with her foot. On a stormy morning on the golden stretch of Porthmeor beach, I got to see this paint-splattered studio for myself; its floor-to-ceiling window looking out on to fast-moving clouds and ferocious waves.<\/p>\n
Like Merce Cunningham\u2019s \u201cchoreography by chance\u201d, Barns-Graham was thinking about \u201chow things hold together\u201d \u2013 not least her marriage, which ended in divorce in 1963. Referring to her 1968 oil painting on board Olive Green Squares on Vermillion, she compared the erratic block of squares against a rage of red to \u201ca broken marriage\u201d \u2013 her own. Yet with Protest \u2013 another volatile blockwork which was made in 1967 as the Vietnam war raged and a year after the Beatles had released Revolver \u2013 \u201cshe was [also] thinking about participation and action and what you can do as an artist or viewer. She\u2019s making the moves, she\u2019s a part of it, she\u2019s no longer in awe of a natural phenomenon that\u2019s doing its own thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Are they soundwaves?\u2019 \u2026 Eight Lines, Porthmeor, 1986. Photograph: Tate Photography\/\u00a9 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/p>\n
When the Beatles came along, \u201cworking-class men were cool and posh women weren\u2019t,\u201d says Cousins. \u201cBut she just kept going.\u201d In the 1980s, Barns-Graham\u2019s tumult of squares made way for the thumbprint pen-and-ink lines of her Small Energy Drawings. \u201cAre they soundwaves? Is it the wind?\u201d Norris ponders. \u201cSometimes she\u2019d look out from the cathedral-esque window of her studio in St Ives and turn her back to it, playing music and drawing lines that replicated the sea.\u201d Another \u201cchoreography by chance\u201d: first you observe, then you listen, then you feel. That precision and intuition can exist in such harmony in these artworks speaks profoundly to Barns-Graham\u2019s own particular genius.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt my age there\u2019s no time to be lost,\u201d Barns-Graham said in the 1990s. \u201cI say to myself: \u2018Do it now, say it now, don\u2019t be afraid.\u2019\u201d Drawn to the late works of Picasso and Joan Mir\u00f3, and incensed by the environmentally ruinous decade in which she was living (\u201cthe most appalling time of abuse of living things,\u201d she remarked), the octogenarian slapped colour on to the canvas with an energy that was both urgent and physical. \u201cThe St Ives narrative flattened her,\u201d Cousins says of this late flourish. \u201cIt saw her as one of many. It is important to extract her from St Ives and see her as a singular imaginative person.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the centre of Tate St Ives\u2019 newly opened retrospective of the British modernist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, her monumental…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":821887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-821886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}