WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM EVOLUTION WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM EVOLUTION Barns-Graham sketching from a vantage point above Porthgwidden, 1947 Photo: Central Office of Information, London Sherborne House 2 3 EVOLUTION In discussing the art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham one is struck by the variety of imagery. On cursory viewing, she appears to have kept altering her style; her work has been representational, hard edge abstract, expressionist. This variability is likely to have made her appear as contrary, reflecting a painter who did not know what she was doing or where she wanted to go. In hindsight it is possible of course to look back on Barns-Graham’s career and to see the links that reveal her as an ever-investigative painter who remained true to her artistic principles and who was constantly evolving a personal visual language. Within the context of this exhibition it is aimed to identify some of these links that illustrate the evolution of her imagery. From the beginning, Barns-Graham’s primary source of inspiration has been the world around her, the environment in which she lived and worked. Early paintings from c.1940 indicate the manner in which she was beginning to deconstruct the landscape, simplifying shapes and forms with their respective colours. However it was not long after her arrival in St Ives in 1940, through the influence the artists whom she quickly met there (Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Borlase Smart, Sven Berlin, for example), that she began to question the direction in which her painting was heading. The most significant innovation in her work from the 1940s derived from the ideas of Naum Gabo, a Russian émigré artist who was living with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Gabo was interested in the principle of stereometry – defining forms in terms of space rather than mass. Hepworth was exploring this notion within her sculpture. In Barns-Graham’s work, it is first seen in the studies, and subsequent paintings, of the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, which she visited in 1949. In describing the glacier she enthused “It seemed to breathe! Enormous standing forms, polished like glass with sharp edges,... which could include buried in it and on it, huge and tiny stones and rubble. This likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid rough ridges made me wish to combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through, and all around, as a bird flies, a total experience.”1 ‘Study of Upper Glacier’ and ‘End of Glacier’ (both 1949) represent this breakthrough. In ‘Cliff Face’, 1952, one of the last of the series, there is a sense that the rock face has been turned inside out. Later, she was to revisit the glacier idea in 1977 (Glacier Grindelwald) and again in 1987, with a variation of the theme, inspired by the shattered ice on puddles found on a walk through the woods of Balmungo, her St. Andrews home - ‘Variation on a Theme Splintered Ice No.1’. STUDY OF UPPER GLACIER GRINDELWALD 1949, offset drawing, 44.2 x 61.2 cm 4 5 CLIFF FACE GLACIER 1952, oil on canvas, 101.5 x 91.5 cm 1978, gouache on paper, 77.3 x 57.3 cm 6 7 The principal elements of Barns-Graham’s working method – the paring down of forms, the investigation of the internal structure of the landscape – come together in the rock and field paintings made between 1952 and 1958. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s she had continued to redefine the local landscape – ‘White Cottage, Cornwall’, 1944; ‘Tregarthen Farm, Zennor’, 1949; ‘Porthleven’, 1951 Each of these three paintings contains characteristics that pave the way for the future. ‘White Cottage, Cornwall’ consists of a ghostly white cottage with a sketchily drawn landscape and sea; but it is the strong pink form suggesting a pier to the house’s left that is the most striking feature. The handling of this form is significant when seen in relation to the foreground standing stones shapes of ‘Three Rock Forms’, 1951, which are quite loosely defined, set against the background sea. As the work evolved, shapes became more solid and crisper; the geometry of ‘Composition – Sea’, 1954, is more static, with a feeling for distance alluded to rather than clearly described, and less the notion of being a representational landscape painting. Barns-Graham was continuing to explore new places. As in the first glacier sketches her drawings of the period are some of her most revealing works. Not unexpectedly, drawing was an important part of the working process; “I have sessions of drawing and consider it important to make studies, to develop one’s awareness of to inner perception....I attempt to seek out sculptural, architectural and linear qualities... always to study the function of forms and formations, drawing with simplicity. I get at the real essence of things which can be as miraculous as anything devised by the imagination...”2 ‘Clay Workings, Chiusure’ (1954) typifies her investigations of the Tuscany landscape, where the field shapes on the landscape surface are juxtaposed with an impression of the unseen structural forms beneath, while the later lava studies of the 1980s show her continued interest in land formation, and the abstract possibilities of the volcanic rock forms of Lanzarote (‘Lava Forms 3, Lanzarote’, 1993). Nonetheless, the drawings were not studies for particular paintings. “I seldom work from my drawings. The discipline used releases me in my paintings, to work more freely, expand with ideas and imagination involving joy in colour, texture and harmony, I start creating (sic)”.3 They acted only as part of a working process, recording observations for future use. ‘Tregarthen Farm, Zennor’ and ‘Porthleven’ are precursors to a series of paintings based on the Yorkshire Dales. In 1956 she briefly took up a teaching position at Leeds School of Art. ‘Snow at Wharfdale 2’ of 1957 is less descriptive of a particular place, less topographical than the two earlier works. In this picture, the inter-relationship and arrangement of the fields is the dominant subject, emphasized by a lack of colour of the winter landscape. The curvature of the dark lines (dry stone walls) gives the illusion of the shape of a hillside which, through the diminishing scale of randomly angled shapes retreats back to a leaden grey sky. VARIATION ON THE THEME SPLINTERED ICE NO.1 ‘Yellow’ Painting’ of the same year, takes this concept one stage further, by not only removing any sense of 1987, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm visual perspective but extending the pattern making of irregular shapes. 8 9 TREGARTHEN FARM, ZENNOR WHITE COTTAGE 1949, oil on paper, 29.5 x 40 cm 1944, gouache on paper, 44 x 58 cm 10 11 THREE ROCK FORMS CLAY WORKINGS, CHIUSURE 1951, oil on canvas, 45.2 x 60.5 cm 1954, pencil on tempera ground, 43 x 54.5 cm 12 13 ‘Yellow Painting’ takes away the representation of landscape almost entirely, the artist stepping towards delivering a purely abstract image. It goes further than ‘White, Black and Yellow (Composition February)’, also of 1957, to which it is also strongly related. Their principal relationship lies in the underlying construction of the compositions, in her use of the ‘Golden Section’, a method of division in a mathematically determined rectangle, as illustrated by the exposed lines of the underlying grid. (Barns- Graham often repeated this mechanism. See ‘Wind Movement No. 1’ and ‘Celebration VE Night’ of 1995.) Black vertical bars that accentuate the picture’s perspective and visual movement are attached on to the underlying grid. Not only do these enhance a sense of space but they lead the eye across the picture from left to right, before eventually drawing the eye towards a vanishing point in the top right corner. A form of the bars reappears in different guise as the dancing brushstrokes of the Scorpio images forty years later, where they serve a similar purpose. Barns-Graham’s imagery, diverse as it came to be from the early 1960s onwards, is constantly a synthesised reflection of the natural world. Working through a hard edge abstraction using only colour and basic geometric forms - the square and circle - the paintings are often more descriptive of actual objects than is apparent on first impression. Titles can give clues though titling of pictures was usually left until a painting was finished; at the outset of the painting process no such idea may have been directly in the artist’s mind though an association may reveal itself as the picture progressed. ‘Cinders’ (1964) is composed of small stamped squares, irregularly placed, that give the composition considerable visual movement. The animation is further enhanced by the carefully modulated fiery reds and oranges that blanket the image. Even without such a stated title, the painting is very evocative of burning embers. Similarly, the multitude of brown and orange disks in the less suggestively titled ‘Brown and Orange’(1972), from the ‘Migration’ or ‘Birds In Flight’ series, carries the possible interpretation of a flock of birds caught in the act of rising (or descending) in the air. On a simplistic level the painting is composed of coloured circles on a plain background, but it is quite possible to interpret it in terms of the real world. One of the last expressions of this formal play of shapes is the expansive 1985 painting ‘Summer Painting No.2’, in which triangles, circles and rhombuses cluster together in a single image. Inspired by the holiday makers on Porthmeor Beach, over which her studio house looked, the beach towels, kites and screens literally fly across the canvas, blown by an unseen wind.