News: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Decade by Decade
I'm delighted to have been asked by the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust to select a work to talk about for the 1950s, in their Decade by Decade Series.
For the 1950s, I selected work from Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's Glacier Series as some of the thinking behind the work really resonated with my own art practice. I also feel that this drawing demonstrates what was a real turning point in the development of Barns-Graham's career in terms of her move towards abstraction.
To give some background, in 1949 Barns-Graham went on holiday to Switzerland, where a trip to the Grindelwald Glacier was to shape her artistic practice for many years to come. She was fascinated by the layers and forms of ice and rock, the movement of the glacier as it melted and reformed and the contrasts of transparency and solidity, strong light and dark crevices.
But most importantly, to her the glacier was alive, it was breathing. She wanted to capture the physicality and awe of her experience rather than a simple snapshot of one moment in time.
There is a sense of landscape in Study for Large Shelf I, but it has been abstracted by multiple viewpoints and a focus on feeling rather than naturalism. The energetic lines make the drawing seem in flux, just as Barns-Graham would have experienced it as the sun moved across the ice changing shadows and shapes.
I selected this 1951 drawing, rather than the large paintings produced in this series, to demonstrate her skill and draughtsmanship and also how integral drawing was to her practice, both in-situ and back in the studio. I really resonated with this, as drawing in-situ whilst walking up munros in Scotland forms the basis for my own abstract landscape paintings. Reading Willie’s diary entries from her trip, talking about her excitement at the texture, form and colour of the glacier and how she wanted to capture the total experience feels like a shared manifesto between her practice and mine.
Barns-Graham was ahead of her time, both in her abstraction of landscape and her forming of this Trust. As well as celebrating her work, the Trust was established to help artists in the future. I’ve been lucky enough to benefit from this through the Society of Scottish Artists and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2019, and I’ve used this award to develop a new body of work that further investigates my experience of landscape.
To want your legacy to support emerging artists in the future is an amazing thing, and I think she was truly a great artist.
Images courtesy of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust Collection.
