Wilhelmina Barn s- Graham P AINTINGS Inglis Allen is delighted to be associated with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Art First in sponsoring this catalogue and wish them both every success with the exhibition. The company's involvement is a re-affirmation of its commitment to supporting the pursuit of excellence in the Arts. I NGLIS A LLEN As one of the UK's leading providers of print solutions to the art, design, and paper communi ties, Inglis Allen offers a 24-hour service (types etting, origination, printing, finishing, binding and distribution) from Central Scotland. We specialise in producing fine art catalogues, paper sample swatches, corporate brochures and newsletters, event programmes and annual reports. With over 140 years of experience – the roots of the company date back to the mid 1800's – the company is committed to providing the highest standards of innovation, service and quality. Rock forms, St Ives Wilhelmina Barns-G raham PAINTINGS 30th October – 22nd November, 2001 ART FIRST CONTEMPORARY ART ART FIRST CONTEMPORARY ART ART FIRST LONDON First Floor Gallery, 9 Cork Street, London W1S 3LL HOURS Monday to Friday 10am to 6pm Saturday 11am to 2pm TELEPHONE 020 7734 0386 FAX 020 7734 3964 E - MAIL artfirst @dircon.co.uk ART FIRST NEW YORK 42 West 15th Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011 HOURS Wednesday to Friday, 2– 6pm and Saturdays by appointment TELEPHONE 212 366 9749 FAX 212 727 2714 E - MAIL Artfirstnyc @aol.com www.artfirst.co.uk Wilhelmina Barns-G raham A lady in her nineties , who visited the exhibition W. Barns-Graham: Painting as a Celebration at the Crawford Arts Centre in St Andrews this autumn, cautiously ventured that ‘it was all very modern’. Diana Sykes, the Crawford’s Director, had the pleasure of telling her that most of the paintings had been done recently by a lady in her 90th year. It is the youthfulness, the vitality, of Barns-Graham’s art which delights and astonishes her many admirers. When I interviewed her earlier this year after she had received the CBE, she began by reading out some notes she had prepared about her art and what particularly mattered to her: ‘Now I am at the stage of urgency. My theme is celebration of life, joy, the importance of colour, form, space and texture. Brushstrokes that can be happy, risky, thin, fat, fluid and textured. Having a positive mind and constantly being aware and hopefully being allowed to live longer to increase this celebration’. 7 Colour and brushstroke are the special concern and distinction of her recent work – their inseparability driven to increasing extremes of simplicity. Simplicity that comes from technical mastery and a lifetime’s contemplation; an art honed by practice and experience. Barns-Graham could not work in closer proximity to nature. At St Ives, where she usually spends the sunnier months, she has worked for over 60 years in one or other of the purpose-built modern studios on the edge of Porthmeor Beach. There, her picture window is a perpetual drama of sea and light. Whereas at Balmungo near St Andrews, her winter home, she lives in a warren of a house, hemmed in by rhododendrons and overshadowed by high trees. 8 At Balmungo, too, the coast is near and the air is unpolluted. At night the heavens retain a majesty those of us who live in cities never see. Visitors are often as awe-struck as cavemen when they witness such marvels as meteor showers or the Milky Way shimmering with colour. Barns-Graham watched the solar eclipse at Balmungo, a primordial experience even in its partial northern state; and she has seen several, even more ethereal, lunar eclipses – one turning the Moon a smouldering red, with a lick of orange at the base, black at the top, and a halo of spectral light, from pale yellow to midnight blue, extending into the empyrean. The northern lights, the night sky suddenly shot the colour of a pigeon’s neck, are sometimes seen. Natural wonders like these hint at temporal enormities beside which the history of Man is but a second’s worth. A brushstroke is a measure of time; and the urgency and risk, the striving for the essential, which characterise these new paintings, is time driven. There is a sense of enormity in the meditative August 2000 , the flashes of blue and crimson suggesting this apparently spinning circle is not an orb but a window to the beyond. Barns-Graham usually has several paintings in progress. She studies them and then selects one or two which she will work on – adding the colour layer upon layer, perhaps no more than 9 a brushstroke or a crucial but insignificant line drawn with a dribble, as in May 3, 2001 . She has that essential gift of knowing precisely when to stop. The paintings selected for this exhibition fall into series where a colour, usually the ground, predominates: grey, green, blue, burnt red, black. Barns-Graham is at ease with colour. Moods and seasons play their part. Some of her paintings are happy, some sombre; some are quick, some slow; some dance, some are stately as a march. It is interesting to learn that the fresh and breezy February was done in February and the lush Balmungo, June 1999 in June, when floral colours blaze against the green. But one should beware of literal association. The burnt-red paintings were indeed done in autumn – yet not at Balmungo, with its gold and russet beeches, but treeless St Ives. Barns-Graham’s colour evokes but does not depict. Nor does it decorate. The colour abuts, over-rides, interweaves, bolsters or stands – a matter of weights and measures, tempos and rhythms, space and time. The palette is as honest as the method is direct. Art is a language and hence, unavoidably, art is enabled by art. Barns-Graham is easily placed in a modern Scottish tradition of celebratory colourists, which includes her art-school contemporary 10 and fellow man of Fife, William Gear; but, like Gear and in the best Scottish tradition, she is an internationalist. David Brown recalls her enthusiasm for a show by Agnes Martin that he curated at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and the highpoint of a visit to St Ives with eight young Japanese curators, when everyone ended sitting on the floor of her studio ‘the Japanese demonstrating calligraphy and writing ideograms and Willie making her own versions of such writing’. Artists take, but they also give. Ben Nicholson was an inspiration to Barns-Graham when she arrived in St Ives but he also acknowledged his debt to her in a title to one of his works. She has sometimes been criticised for producing representational and abstract work in parallel, on the grounds that she should have confined herself to one or the other. What this fails to appreciate is that she has never deviated, whatever superficial appearance to the contrary, from ‘the importance of colour, form, space and texture’ and the celebration of the wonder of the world – the world we inherited and are in danger of exchanging for a virtual reality. John McEwen Art Critic, The Sunday Telegraph 11 Yellow & Blue, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 152.5cm Untitled, 38/99 , 1999. acrylic on Arches paper, 58 x 77cm February , 2000, acrylic on Arches paper, 58 x 77cm Gaia (May) , 2000, acrylic on Arches paper, 57.8 x 77cm Vision Series No.4 , 2001, acrylic on Arches paper, 77 x 57cm Happening 2 (Outburst) , 2000, acrylic on Arches paper, 58 x 77cm Porthmeor Beach, St Ives Wilhelmina Barns-G raham An Appreciation This has been an exceptional year for Wilhelmina (Willie to her friends) Barns-Graham. She is awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours List; she is a principal exhibitor at the Carlow Arts Festival in Ireland; she is awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of Exeter (to go alongside the ones from St. Andrews University and University of Plymouth); an exhibition W. Barns-Graham: Painting as a Celebration has begun its tour at the Crawford Art Centre, St. Andrews; the book on her life and work W. Barns-Graham: A Studio Life , written by Lynne Green, is published by Lund Humphries; and she has her new paintings on show in London now. Not bad for an artist who, at 89, continues to make waves. This is a good time to be seeing Willie’s paintings. She is making some of the best work of her life. She paints with an energy and bravura which belies her years and yet results from her being mindful of her age. These late paintings are the product of someone who is aware of life, the 25 W. Barns-Graham working in her studio, St Ives enjoyment of being alive and the shortness of life. Time is important. Time indeed is the title of a series of screenprints which she began in 1999 – Another Time , Just in Time , Quiet Time , Walkabout Time , Vision in Time . Willie’s recent popularity has been a long time in coming, but the rise has been meteoric in the past five years. Long overshadowed by her peers she has at last burst forth as more and more people have discovered her. Instead of being a self publicist she has kept her head down in the studio while others have made the headlines. No more! Things have changed entirely as a new generation of curators, critics and collectors have begun to appreciate her work. Born in St. Andrews in 1912 Willie studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art.