Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) – Willie to her friends – was a Scottish avant-garde painter who emerged from the St Ives school, a group of experimental artists who converged on Cornwall in the mid 20th century. Mark Cousins’s 24th feature, relayed in the Belfast film-maker’s inimitable style, is lovingly curated from the artist’s journals and photographs.
Working from Lynne Green’s biography A Studio Life, Cousins alternately probes and marvels. Animation enlivens Willie’s early abstractions: red squares jostle as if they are about to break out of the frame; primary colours blaze through black grids.
Cousins’s regular collaborator Tilda Swinton reads from Barns-Graham’s diaries, relaying the artist’s revelatory experiences while journeying through the Grindelwald glaciers in Switzerland during the late 1940s.
The Bernese Alps provide what she called “a sudden glimpse into deeper things”. They imprinted themselves on her subsequent work. Her colours and shapes took on geological aspects. Her geometric compositions came to resemble imagined landscapes.
There are fascinating biographical details: the stern Scottish father who kept a strap at the table; her short marriage to David Lewis; and her conversion to the Baha’i faith.
These details are less interesting to Cousins than getting inside Willie’s brain. Early in the film he dissects a line in her diary, noting the unlikely grey connections between a sock, a rock and an elephant. He ponders how synaesthesia, a neurological condition wherein numbers, letters, colours and emotions become associated, affected her work.
Mostly, he lets the painting do the talking, lingering long and admiringly over his subject’s canvases.
Barns-Graham was sidelined by the macho, modernist art community for much of her lifetime. She kept painting into her 90s and enjoyed considerable late recognition. One suspects she would have greatly appreciated Cousins’s idiosyncratic chronicle.
A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is on limited release from Friday, October 25th
