ADisciplineof theMind
TheDrawings of WilhelminaBarns-Graham
ThePierArtsCentre • TheBarns-GrahamCharitableTrust
ADisciplineof theMind
TheDrawings ofWilhelminaBarns-Graham
Published in connection with the 2009 exhibition
A Discipline of the Mind. The Drawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
at The Pier Arts Centre and touring. Curated by Mel Gooding
The Pier Arts Centre, Victoria Street, Stromness, Orkney KW16 3AA
Telephone 01856 850209 / www.pierartscentre.com
The exhibition mounted by The Pier Arts Centre in co-operation with
The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust and with support from Orkney Island Council,
Scottish Arts Council, and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
The Pier Arts Centre is a registered Scottish Charity No. SC 014815
ISBN 0 9531131 9 1
Adisciplineof theMind
TheDrawings of WilhelminaBarns-Graham
ThePierArtsCentre • TheBarns-GrahamCharitableTrust
Thought,feeling and form
The drawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
I have always been interested in drawing–it is a discipline of the mind. I seek to discover abstract
shapes, accepting the subject’s demands often touching different moods.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
W I l h E l M I N A B A r N S - G r A h A M once spoke of her extraordinarily prolific and diverse output
as a draughtsman as ‘just drawings’. By this apparently diffident reference to one of the most brilliantly distinctive bodies of graphic work in twentieth century British art, she meant that her drawings, for the most part, were not regarded by her to be an aspect of her primary artistic practice,
which was in painting and printmaking, but somehow secondary to it: not so much an end in themselves as a means to the discovery of a kind of information which, assimilated, could be used later
in her continuing creative project. She regarded them as exercises, at once perceptual and conceptual– ‘a discipline of the mind’ –that might nourish and inform the visual imagination. ‘[And] then’
she said, ‘I turn my back on them; I don’t work directly from them afterwards; they’re drawings, studies, straightforward . . . ’ Nevertheless, Barns-Graham worked at her drawings with great dedication
and developed a number of quite distinct methods and styles, each of which can be seen to fulfil
different purpose.
The abstract imagery of the majority of her paintings and prints from the mid-1950s departs, with
deliberation and sometimes to an extreme degree, from any immediate representation of the
perceived world of appearances. The drawings, on the other hand, are remarkable for their extreme
fidelity to it, their intense record of an almost preternatural concentration on the visible and perceptible. her drawings are rarely to be considered as ‘studies’ towards some other more finished mode
of realisation, indeed, after her seminal work on the ‘glacier’ theme around 1950 there is little if any
direct correspondence between her drawings at any given time and her paintings. The sketchbooks
do not reveal any assiduous experimental projection of anticipated paintings, or any process
whereby abstract images are derived by simplification or generalisation from observational drawings. her progressive and programmatic working out of successive themes in painting and printmaking seems to have been done separately and directly en series on canvas or plate.
Facing page: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham sketching above Portgwidden, 1947 (Central Office of Information)
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‘I seldom work from my drawings’, she wrote. ‘The discipline used releases me in my paintings
to work more freely, expand with ideas and imagination involving joy in colour, texture and
harmony, [to] start creating.’ It is an unusually rigorous separation of functions implied here,
between the close and empathetic attention paid to actualities in drawing–often working in the
field, directly from the motif–and the joyful freedom of imaginative invention in the painting
studio and print workshop. It takes us to the heart of her creativity, hinting at its inner dynamic,
at once phenomenological and intellectual, experiential and experimental. ‘I consider it important
to make studies,’ –her use of the term here refers to repeated treatments of a particular motif–
‘to develop one’s awareness to inner perception, collecting shapes that become my shapes. To see
later what is useful, [but] now with increased understanding of the importance to be in union with
nature. To identify with its rhythm so that, again, later I can express myself in my own language.’
This distinction between the experience of the world and our codification or expression of that
experience, in scientific descriptions or artistic equivalents, is central to the modern (and modernist)
understanding of nature and the place of the human within it. At some point it became clear that
the idea of picturing the world as an action of the mind upon an outer reality that is separate and
mindless–‘nature’ –was in no way adequate to the complex interrelation of the observer and the
observed. So far from being purely ‘objective’, our looking at the world is in fact a restless combination of preconception, subjective perception, cognition, and purposeful selection. We cannot simply
distinguish the observer and the observed one from the other: they are in a constant condition
of interaction. Our eyes are a function of our brains; to see is to think: and so it is with all our senses.
So it was that many modern artists began to see themselves as not so much ‘representing’ the world
as reporting and recording from within it and as part of it. The old view of art as an imitation or transcription of what was seen by the external eye was inadequate to a modern, scientifically informed
vision of the world. Art would function, rather, as a means to revealing the underlying rhythms and
energies of a living nature, and as a means of presenting our experience, emotional, intellectual,
phenomenological, of the world of space, light and dark, colour, atmosphere, of the look and feel
of natural objects, of the organic rhythms and patterns of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and
of their unpredictable disruptions. For Barns-Graham,‘things of a kind in order and disorder’became
a catchword.
‘I’m always searching, and I believe in drawing’ said Barns-Graham. ‘My drawings are not pretentious’– by which she meant that they do not try to state a definitive truth about their subjects,
but that ‘[they need] constantly to search and abstract, to communicate; our work is what we are.’
her drawings enact the dialectics of observation and reflection: we are what we see, and what
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we think about it. ‘I’ve studied cloud formations, wave movements, the effect of water and heat on
clay country, ice and so forth . . . I was interested in bird flights, the design of foxglove leaves, the backs
of fern leaves . . . There is great order and disorder in cell formations, in personal relationships, in rush
hour crowds . . .’ Drawing became for her the basis of an artistic practice that was essentially a mode of
research into natural reality, the underpinning of her experiments in successive styles of abstraction.
In all this, Barns-Graham is reprising with a personal inflection what she had learned from Naum
Gabo, who, of the senior artists she had known in her early years in St Ives (the others being Ben
Nicholson and Barbara hepworth) had the most profound and lasting intellectual influence on her.
‘There is nothing in nature that is not in us’ Gabo wrote in 1956. ‘Whatever exists in nature, exists
in us in the form of our awareness of its existence. All creative activities of Mankind consist in the
search for an expression of that awareness.’ For Gabo, art was, like science, an expression of a fundamental human impulse to discover images and construct objects that would realise and make
visible an order that is hidden in the contingent forms of nature. ‘Our thinking and perception are
creative acts’, he wrote in 1957. ‘The primary stage of these creative acts consists of building up in
our consciousness distinct images of everything we perceive or think of; only when we succeed
in getting a clearly defined image of them, do we know them. Images are thus the building blocks
of our consciousness and in their entirety constitute that which we call reality.’
The intuitive and imaginative interactions with nature that characterise much of the best art in the
modern period constitute something more than either mirrorings or refractions, magnifications
or amplifications of the actual. Martin Kemp, referring specifically to Barns-Graham’s drawings, wrote
of her perception of nature as involving ‘inner seeing’ as much as ‘outer sensing’; in her own terms
it was ‘something to do with inner perception and outward observation.’ her mentor Gabo was clear
about the implications of this for the artist: ‘[what] we perceive with our five senses is not the only
aspect of life and nature to be sung about . . . life and nature conceal an infinite variety of forces,
depths and aspects never seen [and that might be] more concretely felt through some kind of image
communicable not only to our reason but to our immediate everyday perceptions and feelings
of life and nature.’
like many of her talented fellow artists in St Ives, Barns-Graham came to believe that only abstraction could accurately convey the interpenetrating realities of the outer and inner eye–the ‘seeing
and sensing’–and bring to that process the knowledge we have of the hidden dynamics of the
material world thus experienced. It was from Gabo, above all, that she learnt how drawing could
do more than delineate the external aspect of natural objects: by adopting the device of an imagined transparency, it could propose, in a linear fantasy, visible graphic equivalents for the invisible
7
energies internal to natural forms and determinant of them. She had in her studio for many years
a transparent perspex construction by Gabo, Spiral Theme, and she had first hand experience of his
carvings and paintings of the late ’30 and early ’40s, in which he constantly exploited this device.
Barns-Graham was of course familiar with D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, and she had
been deeply impressed by his emphasis on the relation of inner space to outer form, and on how the
mechanical and energetic determinants of organic structures were reducible to the mathematics
of geometry and logarithmic progression. Drawing, as D’Arcy Thompson was aware, and all those
interested in morphology know, is the means to the clearest demonstration of these dynamic relations. ‘Studying leonardo’s drawings of waves led me to D’Arcy Thompson,’ said Barns-Graham,
in an interview to celebrate her eightieth birthday; ‘[his drawings of] shell formations led me to [the
sea-wave and snow-storm spiral paintings of] Victor Pasmore, then back to leonardo da Vinci and
[then] back to my own studies . . .’
This mention of her interest in the work of D’Arcy Thompson (she was brought up in St Andrews,
where he lived and taught for most of his life, and knew his family) may serve to remind us that the
conventional critical association of Barns-Graham with the post-war St Ives artists, though it has an
historical and circumstantial basis, has obscured important and specifically Scottish affinities in her
intellectual and artistic identity. To trace these crucial affinities, it is first necessary, however, to go
back many years, to May, 1949, when Barns-Graham spent that ecstatic time walking, climbing and
drawing on the Grindelwald Glacier, beneath the towering North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland.
It was the single most formative experience of her artistic life. She was enthralled not only by the
visible spectacle of physical forms of awe-inspiring beauty, but also deeply impressed by the
immense power of the underlying forces at work in their constant shifting and shaping of the ice,
the contrast of slow-moving glacial flow and the evanescent brilliance of prismatic light, reflective
opacity and absorbent translucency. What she had experienced so profoundly in those momentous
days on the Grindelwald Glacier was a vital intuition of nature’s hidden inner energies, and sheer
wonder at its spectacular outer forms. ‘It seemed to Breathe!’ she wrote. ‘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 round, as a bird flies, a total experience . . .’
From then on, it was the dynamic, shifting relation between inner energy and outer form, and her
inner and outer sense of that dynamic, that her art sought to reveal. This deep feeling for nature as
a living force, and for the landscape as the expression of hidden and ultimately ordered energies, she
shared with certain of her most distinguished Scottish contemporaries, among them the visionary
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Facing page: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham at a rubbish dump, 1947 (Central Office of Information)
writers, Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd: ‘So there I lie on the plateau,’ writes Nan Shepherd, recording
an experience on the Cairngorms,‘under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire
of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and
snow–the total mountain . . . Up on the mountain, the eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees
in a new way what it had already seen . . . A mountain has an inside.’
As well as exhibiting in her work a phenomenological impulse similar to that of Neil Gunn and Nan
Shepherd, Barns-Graham was, like them, deeply affected by Zen. her later paintings, being executed
in the paradoxical manner of Zen ink drawing, are simultaneously perfectly-practiced and prepared
for and perfectly automatic and unpremeditated. In her drawings, whatever their style or subject,
she constantly combines the objective and the poetic-subjective in the Zen-like way that raises
what Neil Gunn in his testament The Atom of Delight calls the ‘exhilarating question’: ‘Poetry is there
and physics is there . . . . are they absolutes or two aspects of a unity behind?’he goes on:‘From experience I have discovered that where the exhilarating is, unity is round about’.
Gunn’s ‘exhilaration’ is clearly to be identified as a version of the ‘wonder’ that the great aesthetician
r. W. hepburn–for many years the Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh–wrote about in his essay
on that subject: ‘the wonder aroused by the discerning of intelligible patterns in nature has, in turn,
been one main motivation in scientific enquiry.’ This reflects, of course, that deep tradition of Scottish polymathic cross-disciplinary intellectuality whose history and significance has been examined
and celebrated so brilliantly by George Elder Davie, and which is manifest throughout the work of
another poetic contemporary of Barns-Graham, hugh MacDiarmid, whose great poem On a Raised
Beach begins, as with life:‘All is lithogenesis . . .’
On the moraine of an ancient glacier on the Shetland island of Whalsay, the poet muses on the
origins and the destinations of natural things, including the human, bringing the eternal to the
immediacy of the moment:
Nothing has stirred
Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago
But one bird…
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
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But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be . . .
Barns-Graham dedicated herself over the years to her own version of this intellectual and intuitive
creativity, this opening of the inward gate of natural common sense, the common sense of the
senses. On the glacier at Grindelwald in the late 1940s, on the volcanic island of lanzarote in the late
’80s and early ’90s, in Tuscany over many years, in her garden at Balmungo, in Fife, and at Porthmeor
Bay, over which she looked every day from her St Ives studio, she proved herself a draughtsman
of visionary gift, capable of tracing, in precise linearity and expressive tone and colour, the dynamism and rhythm of things. her drawing is a wonderfully flexible instrument, always alive to the
structures and the informing energies of both the natural and the made world. It registers with
extreme economy the dark monumental mass of a volcanic hill and the magical translucency
of a glacier, the inner dynamics of up-rearing rock forms, the inner currents of a rolling sea-swell, the
rhythmic repetition and overlap of incoming coastal waves, the diversity of organic tree forms, and
the geometry of architecture in the space of a human landscape.
Mel Gooding
March 2009
Text references
Quotations from Wilhelmina Barns-Graham are from ‘Some thoughts on drawing’ in the catalogue to W Barns-Graham: Drawings,
an exhibition at the Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews, in 1992; from an unpublished tape-recorded interview, from the same
year, with Martin Kemp, who is himself quoted from ‘Fateful line: Drawings by W Barns-Graham’, his introduction to the Crawford
catalogue; and from a letter on the Grindelwald drawings and paintings quoted in The Tate Gallery Report 1964–65 (hMSO,
1966). The series ‘Things of a Kind in Order and Disorder’ is discussed by lynne Green in Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. A Studio Life,
chapter 5 (lund humphries, Aldershot, 2001).
Naum Gabo is quoted from‘Art and Science’, in The New Landscape in Art and Science by Gyorgy Kepes
(Paul Theobald and Co., Chicago, 1956).
Nan Shepherd is quoted from The Living Mountain, chapter 12 (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2008) .
Neil Gunn is quoted from The Atom of Delight, chapter 2 (Polygon, Edinburgh,1986).
r. W.hepburn’s‘Wonder’is in Wonder and Other Essays (Edinburgh University Press, 1984).
George Elder Davie’s major studies are The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh University Press, 1961) and
The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Polygon, Edinburgh, 1986).
hugh MacDiarmid’s‘On a raised Beach’is from Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934) in Collected Poems, Vol 1
(Martin, Brian and O’Keefe, london, 1978).
D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form is published in paperback by Canto (Cambridge University Press,1992).
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Lava Series, 1992, pencil on paper, 56.6 x 76cm. (BGT 1143)
Lanzarote topographies
In Lanzarote violent volcanic activity is relatively recent, and there are still areas where the ground
remains appreciably hot–it is an animate, brooding land, in which the forcefulness of nature
is immanent. How could this palpable drama not touch an artist who had captured with line the
infinite intricacies of Chiusure and Formentera?
lynne Green
Barns-Graham visited lanzarote four times in as many years between 1989 and 1993. She was
fascinated by the black rock formations created by volcanic activity and lava flow in the near
geological past, and greatly impressed by the strange conic hills and islands that dominate the
landscapes and coasts. In this series of large drawings she developed a powerful and brooding
image of the great cones, composed of compressed black ash, against the skyline. The starkly
direct presentation of these grandly simple natural forms, almost silhouette in some of the
drawings, emphasises their comparatively recent creation, and a topographical history in
which there has not been time enough to for geological deformations or surface erosion.
They have, therefore, a near purity of mathematical form that registers the morphological
processes of a regular mineral accretion and settlement.
Against this, in the foregrounds, there are the evidences of more recent process of disruption
and modification. In some cases these are the dramatic outcomes of lava formations, jagged
and apparently chaotic where molten rock has encountered a counterforce or obstacle, elsewhere in elegant parallels of shelved and ordered flow. These are the antitheses of the hillforms: perfect examples together of ‘things of a kind in order and disorder.’ In other cases,
the modifications to the foreground landscape are evidences of man’s agricultural activity
in the rich volcanic soils: walled terraces and vineyard windbreaks, settlements, farms and
fields. In these images, foreground and vista, far and near, order and chaos, the past and the
immediate present are brought together: like the artist, the spectator is in dynamic relation
to this observed world,‘inside’the landscape.
Volcanic Island Lanzarote near La Geria 2, 1989, acrylic on paper, 57 x 77cm. (BGT 976)
Volcanic Island (near Montana del Fuego), 1989, pencil on paper, 56 x 75.5cm. (BGT 669)
Ruta de los Volcanes, Lanzarote, 1989, pencil and wash on paper, 57 x 75.5cm. (BGT 1142)
Lava Muerte, Lanzarote, 1992, pencil on paper, 56.5 x 76cm. (BGT 718)
Black Silence,1990, acrylic on paper, 57 x 76.5cm. (BGT 927)
Black Silence 1, Maquez (Yellow), 1990, gouache on paper, 56.5 x 76.3cm. (BGT 935)
Upper Glacier Theme, 1950, offset drawing, 22.5 x 33.5cm. (BGT 6003)
Rocks, Ice,Trees
Natural morphologies
Every force evolves a form
Gaelic saying
Things are shaped by the energies that act upon them. D’Arcy Thompson, the great biologist,
defined this morphological truism: ‘The form, then, of any portion of matter, whether it be
living or dead, and the changes of form which are apparent in its movements and in its growth,
may in all cases alike be described as due to the action of force.’ From the moment she made
the first drawings and offset monoprints reflecting on her epiphany on the Grindelwald Glacier,
Barns-Graham was committed to the idea of art as a mode of experimental and investigative
research. All her drawing is driven by this inner demand to interrogate the nature of the world,
and make visible its elemental energies and forms.
The‘transparent’drawings from the glacier series picture force and form, energy and structure,
solidity and vacancy. The studies of ragged and up-forced rocks on Formentera and the energetic parallel linearities, spirals and broken arabesques discerned in the lava-flow formations
of lanzarote’s black landscapes each imagine and make visible the complex pressures that
have made those rock-forms distinctive. And the unique but characteristic individuations
described with such extraordinary precision in the tree studies reveal them as living expression of the particularities of circumstance–of soil, weather and human usage–that shape
their growth and scale.
Lava Forms Lanzarote 2, 1992, chalk on black paper, 29.5 x 40.5cm. (BGT 1098)
End of the Glacier, 1949, gouache on paper, 40 x 59cm. (BGT 6399)
Rocks, Formentera, 1958, india ink on paper, 42.5 x 54.5cm. (BGT 751)
Old Oak Tree (St Andrews Cathedral Series), 1979, pencil on card, 53 x 39.5cm. (BGT 582)
Lava Forms, Lanzarote, 1993, conté crayon and wash on paper, 29 x 42cm. (BGT 1092)
Deodar Tree, 1980, pencil on paper, 55 x 76.3cm. (BGT 654)
St Martins Lower Town, 1951, pencil and oil on board, 32.8 x 50.8cm. (BGT 581)
Landscape and Places
Barns-Graham’s more conventional landscape drawings demonstrate an acute observational
grasp of landscape structures and an intuitive insight into the forces, subterranean and
meteorological, that shape those local topographies and give them their enduring character.
Their robustness of line and strongly rhythmic visual music corresponds to that of the mineral
morphologies and architectural constructions they describe with such empathetic precision.
In contrast to the self-conscious aesthetic elegance of Ben Nicholson’s landscape and architectural drawings (to which they are often compared, usually with the false implication that
they are entirely derivative in style from them) they exhibit a direct toughness of perception
and a determined fidelity to the disruptive imperfections of the actual.
They delight also in the constant relation of the static orthogonal geometries of architecture
and horizon to the dynamic swell and curved lines of hillside, valley, shoreline and promontory, and of both to the emptiness of light and space around them and above them. The precise linear definitions of both landscape and architecture are countered in many drawings
by the irregular outlines of trees and the engineered disturbances of clay workings, quarries
and field systems. Atmosphere and mood are supplied by irregular colour grounds, often
worked into the paper before the drawing begins.
Above all, these drawings register a passionate response to the interactions of weather,
time and place with the permanencies of nature:‘Being in the presence of the power and
awe of nature, be it to study the effect of the sun on glaciers in Switzerland, the rain on clay
formations in Tuscany, the lava forms and disturbances in the volcanic areas of lanzarote,
to the passing of cloud and shadows on the hills and sea of Orkney or the wind movements
on sand in Fife, all wonders emphasising the importance of being at one with nature. This
is a contemplation of sensing out, feeling and understanding particular rhythms. not just
on the surface but underground as in Cornwall.’
Clay Workings, Chiusure, 1954, pencil and tempera on paper, 43.3 x 54.6cm. (BGT 752)
Monte Olivetti, 1954, pencil and tempera on paper, 39.5 x 43cm. (BGT 1083)
St Ives from Salubrious House, 1968, pencil and oil on paper, 69.5 x 82cm, 673)
San Gimignano, 1955, pencil and oil on paper, 42.5 x 54.5cm. (BGT 2302)
St Regulus, St Andrews, 1979, pencil and mixed media on card, 39.5 x 53cm. (BGT 1122)
St Monans, 1982, pencil and oil on paper, 76 x 104cm. (BGT 6203)
St Ives No.3, 1985, charcoal, oil, conté crayon on paper, 55.4 x 73.7cm. (BGT 1144)
Stromness, Orkney 1, 1985–6, pencil and oil on paper, 53.5 x 75cm. (BGT 676)
Seven Lines No.2, 1982, pen, ink, oil on card, 16 x 17cm. (BGT 789)
Sea waves and currents
The discovery of energy
These extraordinary descriptions of sea forms might better be described as meditative
abstractions and reflective imaginings. They derive from deeply sensed knowledge of
the ways in which energy finds its forms: in the curve, swell, surge, arabesque and linear
parallels seen in rings of tree grain, in geological strata, in ploughed fields, in lava flow,
in river currents and land forms. They are the outcome also of long years of daily observation of the sea from Fife and Cornwall shores, from coastlines and cliff-tops, and above
all from her Porthmeor studio, with its windows on to the sweeping sands of the bay,
ribbed in these rhythms by the endless tidal inward and outward wash of wave and
breaker, below the constant parallels of sea, sky and light.
This was the very ‘contemplation of sensing out, feeling and understanding’the particular rhythms of nature of which Barns-Graham wrote.‘I get at the real essence of things,
which can be as miraculous as anything devised by the imagination–as in the drama
of the sea, the sky can astonish the mind.’ This contemplation that leads to astonishment
is akin to the mystic’s meditation, the concentrated repetition of word or action, which
has its climax in the ecstatic release of the spirit. There is nothing in this which conflicts
with the profound materialism that animated every aspect of Barns-Graham’s creative
career, and gives her work– in her drawing as in her painting and printmaking–
its underlying philosophical coherence.
Seventeen Lines, 1982, pen, ink, oil on card, 13.2 x 19.3cm. (BGT 166)
Clay Country, Tuscany, 1979, mixed media on card, 19.8 x 27.3cm. (BGT 842)
Against the Wind, 1980, mixed media on card, 33 x 24cm. (BGT 123)
Linear Movement and Circle 2, 1982, pen, ink, oil on card, 19.8 x 13.4cm. (BGT 170)
Linear Meditation 2, 1991, pen, ink, mixed media on card, 14 x 15cm. (BGT 59)
Glacier Knot, 1978, mixed media, ink on card, 27 x 19.8cm. (BGT 76)
Snow Shelf, Fife, 1978, mixed media on card, 29.5 x 20.7cm. (BGT 1902)
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
CBE RSA RSW 1912–2004
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born
in 1999/2000 and 2005 have done much to change people’s
in St Andrews, Fife, on 8th June 1912. As a child she showed very
perceptions of her achievements and repositioned her as one
early signs of creative ability. Determining while at school that she
of the key contributors of the St Ives School.
wanted to be an artist she set her sights on Edinburgh College
of Art where, after some dispute with her father, she enrolled
In 1960 Barns-Graham inherited from her Aunt a family home
in 1931, and, after periods of illness, from which she graduated
near St Andrews which initiated a new phase in her life. From this
with her diploma in 1937.
moment she divided her time between the two coastal communities, simultaneously establishing herself as much as a Scottish
At the suggestion of the College’s principal hubert Wellington,
artist as a Cornish one. The house, Balmungo, was to become the
she moved to St Ives in 1940. This was a pivotal moment in her life.
heart of her business and will continue in the future to be the base
Early on she met Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis and Bernard leach
for the charitable trust which she established in 1987. her Scottish
as well as Ben Nicholson, Barbara hepworth and Naum Gabo who
heritage plays a significant part in her art. In her later years the
were living locally at Carbis Bay. She became a member of the
greatest contribution that Scotland was to make was through the
Newlyn Society of Artists and St Ives Society of Artists but was
hugely rewarding working relationship she developed with her
to leave the latter in 1949 when she became one of the founding
printmakers Graal Press with whom she collaborated on an extra-
members of the breakaway Penwith Society of Artists. She was
ordinary outpouring of screen prints that are an entire body
one of the initial exhibitors of the significant Crypt Group.
of work in their own right.
Barns-Graham’s history is bound up with St Ives where she lived
Barns-Graham exhibited consistently throughout her career,
and worked until her death. The St Ives School, as it came to be
both in private and public galleries. Though not short of exposure
known, began to form in the period after the war, with Peter
throughout the 1960s and 1970s her greatest successes came
lanyon, Terry Frost, Patrick heron, Bryan Winter and roger hilton
in the last decade of her life, that brought her new audiences and
all living or staying frequently in St Ives. Barns-Graham more than
accolades, and saw the publication of the first monograph pub-
held her own artistically within this challenging milieu and in
lished on her life and work, lynne Green’s W. Barns-Graham–
recent years her pro-active contribution to development of St Ives
a studio life. (This was followed by Ann Gunn’s catalogue raisonée
art has been re-assessed. After her successes of the 1950’s Barns-
of prints, published in 2007.) She was made CBE in 2001, and
Graham felt herself to be becoming more and more sidelined
received four honorary doctorates (St Andrews 1992, Plymouth
by the more ambitious members of the group, which led to her
2000, Exeter 2001 and heriot Watt Universities 2003). her work
not having the same high profile of those best known today.
is found in all major public collections within the UK. She died
however important shows surveying her work at the Tate St Ives
in St Andrews on 26th January 2004.
Wilhelimina Barns-Graham
Selected exhibitions and bibliography
Solo exhibitions
1947/49/54
1954
1956/59/60/81/96
Downing Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
roland, Browse and Delbanco, london
Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
1957
City Art Gallery, Wakefield
1971
Marjorie Parr Gallery, london
1978
The New Art Centre, london
1984
The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney
1989–90
1992
1992–3
1995/97/99
1996–7
1999–2000
2002/07
2001/02/04/06/09
2001
2002–04
W. Barns-Graham Retrospective 1940–1989, touring
W. Barns-Graham Drawings. Crawford Art Centre, St Andrews and The royal Cornwall Museum, Truro
W. Barns-Graham at 80, William Jackson Gallery, london touring
Art First, london
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: An Enduring Image, Tate St. Ives
Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
Art First, london
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
W. Barns-Graham: Painting as Celebration, Crawford Art Centre, St. Andrews and touring
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Movement and Light Imag(in)ing Time, Tate St. Ives
2007
Elemental Energies: the Art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Trinity hall, Cambridge
Evolution: Processes in the Work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sherborne house, Sherborne, Dorset
2008
David Krut Projects, New York
2009
A Discipline of the Mind–The Drawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney and tour
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in Italy, 1955 (photograph by David lewis)
Group exhibitions in public galleries
1951
Danish, British and American Abstract Artists, riverside Museum, New York
1953
International watercolour exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, New York
1954
British Painting and Sculpture, Whitechapel Art Gallery, london
1955
Seven Scottish Artists, Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition
1960
Painters from Cornwall, Plymouth City Art Gallery
Tenth Anniversary of the Penwith Society of Art, Arts Council touring exhibition
Contemporary Scottish Artists, Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition in Canada
International exhibition of works in gouache, New York
1969
Paintings 1940–1949, Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition
1977
British Artists of the 60s, The Tate Gallery, london
1984
Homage to Herbert Read, University of Kent, Canterbury
1985
St Ives 1939–64, Tate Gallery, london
1987
Looking West, Newlyn Art Gallery and The royal College of Art, london
1988/89
1989
Freeing the Spirit, Contemporary Scottish Abstraction, Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews
A Century of Art in Cornwall 1889–1989, The County Museum and Art Gallery, Truro, Cornwall
Song of the Sea, Dundee Museum and Art Gallery
1989/90
Scottish Art since 1900, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and tour to Barbican Art Gallery, london
1990
Festival of Fifty-One, Arts Council Collection, touring exhibition
1992
New Beginnings, Postwar British Art, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
1995
Porthmeor Beach: A Century of Images, Tate St. Ives
100 Years Context & Continuity, Newlyn Art Gallery
1997
The 50s works, British Council Collection touring Cyprus and France
2001
St. Ives in the 60s, Tate St. Ives
The Colourist Connection, McManus Gallery, Dundee
2002
Critics Choice (Mel Gooding), Newlyn Art Gallery
2006
Consider the Lilies–Works from Dundee’s Twentieth Century Art Collection, Dean Gallery, National Galleries of Scotland
2007
Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney
Bibliography
Barns-Graham, W
Statement in catalogue Collected Thoughts, W. Barns-Graham retrospective 1940–89, Edinburgh City Art Centre, 1989
Barns-Graham, W
Statement in catalogue, Some Thoughts on Drawing, Crawford Art Centre, 1992
Bertram, Geoffrey
Evolution–Processes in the work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, exhibition catalogue, Sherborne house, Sherborne, Dorset, 2007
Bowness, Alan
Introduction to exhibition catalogue, W. Barns-Graham recent Gouaches and Spanish Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1960
Brown, David
Essay, Some Aspects of Art in St. Ives, Tate St. Ives Friends, 1993
Gooding, Mel
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Movement and Light Imag(in)ing Time, Tate St. Ives exhibition catalogue, 2005
Gooding, Mel
Elemental Energies: the Art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Trinity hall, Cambridge, 2007
Green, lynne
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham–An Enduring Image, Tate St. Ives, 1999
Green, lynne
W. Barns-Graham: painting as celebration, Crawford Arts Centre, St. Andrews, 2001
Green, lynne
W. Barns-Graham: a studio life, lund humphries, 2001
Gunn, Ann
hall, Douglas
Kemp, Prof. Martin
lewis, David
Taylor, John russell
Yakir, Nedira
The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: a complete catalogue, lund humphries, 2007
Introduction to exhibition catalogue, W. Barns-Graham Retrospective 1940–1989, Edinburgh City Art Centre, 1989
Introduction to exhibition catalogue, W. Barns-Graham Drawings, Crawford Art Centre, St. Andrews, 1992
Introduction to catalogue, St Ives 1939–64, The Tate Gallery, london, 1985
Introduction to catalogue, W. Barns-Graham at 80: a New View, William Jackson Gallery, london, 1992
Women Artists and Modernism, edited by Katy Deepwell, Manchester University Press, 1998
A full biography can be found at www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk
The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust was established by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in 1987,
to secure her life’s work and archive for future generations.
The Trust is based at her St Andrews home, Balmungo.
The aims of the trust are:
•
•
To foster, protect and promote the reputation of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.
To advance the knowledge of the life and work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham through exhibitions,
research and publications
•
To create an archive of key works of art and papers, to serve as a source of information about
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s life and work, and to provide access to this collection.
•
•
•
To support and inspire art and art history students, through the provision of bursaries and scholarships.
To make Balmungo the resource centre to deliver the Trust’s aims.
To maintain Balmungo as a place of creativity through an artist-in-residence programme.
The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust is a registered Scottish Charity No. SC 016854
Further information on The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust is available at www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk
Published by The Pier Arts Centre
and The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
Copyright © 2009
The Pier Arts Centre and the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior written permission of
The Pier Arts Centre and the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
Texts © Mel Gooding
Biographic statement © Geoffrey Bertram,
Chairman, The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
All images of works © The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
Photography
Bruce Pert
John Sheerin, Fort Photography
Design & Typography
Strule Steele
Print
De Montfort Press
CHARITABLE TRUST
A Disciplineof the Mind TheDrawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
The Pier Arts Centre • The Barns-Graham CharitableTrust
The Pier Arts Centre