Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 6 June

Wilhemina Barns-Graham

WILLIE, as she was called, was born in 1912 in St Andrews. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, despite some objections from her father, and , hampered slightly by bouts of illness, graduated in 1937. By 1940 she was in St Ives, hobnobbing with Hepworth and Nicholson, Alfred Wallis and Naum Gabo, whose philosophy – that ‘life and nature conceal an infinite variety of forces’ she took on board wholesale.

The Pier’s connection with the group of creative souls who congregated in and about the St Ives coast is well known – but Barns-Graham was sidelined somewhat, and her work has only recently been receiving renewed critical attention. There’s a wonderful picure of her – a handsome girl with elegant hands – inspecting a rubbish tip in 1947, clad in velvet jacked and baggy corduroy trousers, her board slung over her hip, satchel on shoulder, every inch a (rather tidy and soigné) bohemian.

I have an inbuilt resistance to having things explained to me in more complex terms than those the artist herself might use; others might call it an inbuilt bullshit detector, which bleeps when pretentious phrases recur on gallery walls. Well, something was bleeping as I walked around Willie’s work – I found the information on the boards very annoying and repetitive.

Why not let the artist speak for herself? She clearly kept interesting diaries, or work details – the quotes from these and her comments are illuminating. She is fascinated by ‘things of a kind, in order and disorder.’ She sees the business of her art as ‘a contemplation of sensing out, feeling and understanding particular rhythms. Not just on the surface, but underneath.’

Fine! Then all I need is place, biography, influences, dates, development – not another layer of philosophy explaining the philosophy. However, rant over – the drawings themselves calmed me down.

She came to Orkney on a residency in 1984 and you can hear the enthusiasm. ‘So much (sic) work ideas here, – drawings, colour, shapes, moods. Space – elongated shapes – & then the light & rock groupings – water movements, changes – It is overwhelming – choked with it all.’

Despite this breathlessness, what we see in the lovely Pier light are the serenest of studies – capturing the geometry of fields in ochres, greens and yellows. September in Orkney – oil on hardboard – takes the eye across a long low swell of land, quivering in the hot empty air you sometimes get at harvest. The sense of repose is quickened by small intimate texturing, where stubble and corn intrude.

You might think September Evening in Orkney – gouache on paper – might be much the same – but no. She has a quick eye for the island’s subtle transformations. The light is apple-y; the landscape empty of people but full of its own shapes and colours. The little child-like farmhouse, cardboardy in comparison to the depth of the autumn fields, is a St Ives touch, but not at all faux naîve. It fits.

Drawing for her was – not secondary, I think, but separate from her abstract painting and printmaking. It was ‘a discipline of the mind’ which helped to ‘develop one’s awareness to inner perception.’ She is a collector of shapes ‘that become my shapes – so I can express myself in my own language.’ Da Vinci’s wave drawings, for example, are an inspiration – and I wouldn’t be surprised if she liked Durer, and the tree drawings of Dutch and Flemish painters. It’s as if she used drawing as a poet might use a thesaurus or a dialect dictionary, to raid from and store ideas.

Maybe I went the wrong way – but I was drawn through a corridor full of Italian studies – some from the fifties, some from the eighties. In comparison with the coolness of the Orkney scenes, these are rich. Monte Olivetti (1954) shows a sensual swinging pencil. It suggests heat, sterility, and yet vitality. You can see her looking beneath, into the texture of stone.

Some of the later Italian pieces are less vital – rather dry studies of Tabayesco and Arrieta look a bit like what Edward Lear might have produced on his hols – but then – an inspired bit of hanging in the grey floored room which looks out on Stromness harbour and is filled with the cool Orkney weather – two more Orkney studies (plus a rather sketchy fussy little daub of the Holmes).

These controlled, cool, clear drawings of Stromness, sharp with eaves and chimneys and dykes, just a hint of colour in their skies, are a joy. A clear Orkney day does illuminate the linear, the triangles and rectangles – what Mackay Brown called ‘Euclidian light/ which ruled the town in segments blue and gray .’ She gets it dead right – notations of shape become patterns which compel you to enjoy their stripped down simplicity.

Suddenly we’re in Lanzarotte, which she visited four times between 1989 and 1993 – just after Orkney. The contrast is abrupt and exciting. The volcanic nature of the place, the turmoil just under the surface, was grist to the mill of an artist who wanted to look inside hills, rocks, trees, as in lava Muerte . The opposite of our gentle farmland, this landscape bristles with tension. Her eraser is employed with vigour, as are all the B pencils in her satchel. The energy of the drawing fuels unease. Something’s lurking ready to – well, erupt.

In this room the rich colours – crimson, orange, green, scraped and traced and scratched – make me want to see her abstract painting – if these are just notes, imagine a full blown canvas. The skies are fiery – Lanzarrote is an alien world in flux. In La gena, though, we’re in a different atmosphere – it’s almost playful – the hill is a bit like a woolly hat, the rocks are waves, there’s lace, where water’s tumbling.

Maguez is brooding – the little white farmhouse and the cascading stream are a reassurance that movement goes on. This room gets the essence of a foreign landscape – the vines cut across the mountain, soft poplars break the horizon.

I realise I’ve missed a bit; and heck, it’s the epiphany that really set her off – the little room off the corridor takes us to her seminal visit to Grindlewald Glacier, under the Eiger, in 1949. She was stunned. ‘It seemed to breathe,’ she said. Study for Upper Glacier Grindelwald, an off set drawing, is Klee – like in its freedom and elegance; Glacier Drawing 2 – oil and monotype on paper – pulls you in to the massiveness of ice – and then there’s a suggestion of things overtaken by the slow slow march of the cold: boat shapes, bird shapes, stones are engulfed.

The conventional studies of St Ives and Porthieven, pretty, are a let down after all this intensity. Such pretty pics need people. They have a perfunctory look. Perhaps they capture the self-satisfaction of a comfortable little haven, an artistic retreat? Her kirk series, always with gravestones to the fore, have a Caspar Friedrich Romantic melancholy – a wee man in a boat, behind the mass of St Monan’s, is a bonus.

They’re workmanlike, these, but they aren’t ‘getting to the real essence of things’ This is clearly what she was trying to do in a series of meditations on seawaves and currents, in the last, dark little room. Rather Bridget Riley-ish, these, and I’m not fond of them. They make my eyes cross. But perhaps they are simply notes for the painter, mnemonics, and that’s why they seem perfunctory.

The catalogue notes her Scottishness; mentions her contemporaries Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd. Latterly she dotted between St Andrews and St Ives. But I suspect her influence has more to do with a general British post war move – in all the arts – towards nature, away from the tangled metal remains of war. At its simplest, you can see this expressed in the Shell calendars of the fifties. Born later, she’d be doing installations, a child of the eco-movement.

Whatever her motivation, she’s an interesting artist. The higgledy-piggledy way I stumbled through her work (I should go back and do it all in order…) perhaps makes me more aware that she didn’t sing one song; she had many ways of drawing, many different notes in her notebook. But she certainly caught the essence of our Orkney hairst blinks.

© Morag MacInnes, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

• Wilhemina Barns-Graham Trust