Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: an appreciation

ALTHOUGH Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was principally associated with the St Ives school, her origins in St Andrews and her education at Edinburgh College of Art laid the foundations of an artist of rare ability and originality. Her love of the Fife coast brought her back to paint it throughout her life. She responded to the clarity of the light, the winter landscapes and the evocative open spaces.

Her career experienced a late flowering after an exhibition at the Tate St Ives in 1985, which brought her belated recognition and sparked off a lively late period in her own output. As Karen Forbes Visser, the ECA’s head of drawing and painting, said at the ceremony last year to award Barns-Graham an honorary degree: "Through a real strength in draughtsmanship and the subtle use of colour and composition, she confronts the viewer with an intuitive and dynamic response to nature."

Barns-Graham came from a well-known Fife family and in 1932 she went to the ECA. She had little parental encouragement but had, from an early age, known that she wanted to be an artist. She drew voraciously ("they were very private, like secret rooms") and demonstrated a keen ability to contrast colours and create abstract forms.

At Edinburgh, she was fortunate to be tutored by William Gilles, whose modernist and abstract pictures influenced her hugely, and she reassessed her entire approach to art. She won several awards at ECA but perhaps the most enlightening was a travelling scholarship in 1939. As the Second World War loomed, a trip to Europe was impossible - instead she joined a fellow art student, Margaret Mellis, in Cornwall. It was a decision that was to change her life.

In that tight-knit community, she met Ben Nicholson and his wife, Barbara Hepworth, and by 1942 Barns-Graham had a studio overlooking the Porthmeor beach that was to remain a constant inspiration for the rest of her life. Later that year, she was asked to join the St Ives Society of Artists.

In the late Forties, Barns- Graham became fascinated by the mixing of abstract and figurative subjects. She also became a keen student of architecture and captured stark buildings with much imagination and candour.

It was a period of much experimentation and great achievement for her - her first solo exhibition, at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in 1956, confirming her as a very real emerging talent.

She remained close to her roots and bought a house outside St Andrews. She preferred to spend her summers in St Ives and the winters in Fife, finding inspiration in the snow-covered hills of the Tay estuary. She caught the winter sun on frozen objects with an amazing cunning. For example, she was inspired by a frozen puddle of water outside her house near St Andrews and painted a thrilling series of lightening blue/grey paintings, which are among her most innovative works.

Her reputation grew steadily and her works are now to be found in many major private collections, and can be seen in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in Edinburgh, as well as at the Tate, the Victoria and Albert and the Imperial War Museum.

Barns-Graham had a genius for adapting new styles. At the start of her career she was a gifted water-colourist. Her fascination with form led her to abstract subjects, but she also captured multi-coloured circles ("my tiddly-wink period," she laughingly called them). This love of exploring and experimenting never left her: it made her question her own talent and renew her attitude to painting.

The Tate St Ives exhibition rekindled her enthusiasm for painting and she delighted in revisiting subjects such as semi-abstract, landscapes and natural forms with a refreshed vigour. Barns-Graham was an artist who displayed an ability to surprise and excite in equal measures.

Karen Forbes summed her up at last year’s degree ceremony in the McEwan Hall: "As an artist and a key member of the modernist movement in Britain, she has secured an important place in the history of Scottish and British modern art."

ALASDAIR STEVEN