Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Inspirational Journeys

To accompany the exhibition of the same name at The Granary Gallery (26 October 2019 - 23 February 2020), this richly illustrated talk from Rob Airey, Director of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust will examine how a series ‘Inspirational Journeys’ impacted on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's development as an artist.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) was one of the foremost painters working in St Ives after moving there from Edinburgh in 1940. Her paintings, alongside those of her contemporaries that comprise the St Ives School, contributed greatly to the development of Modernist British painting in the mid to late twentieth century.

In particular a series of works that emerged from Barns-Graham’s visit to Switzerland’s Grindelwald Glacier in 1949 would establish her reputation as one of the most inventive painters in the country, with both the Arts Council and British Council acquiring ‘Glacier’ works in 1950. This was the first of a sequence of journeys around Europe which punctuated her career and which between 1953-1993 took in Tuscany, Sicily, Spain, Ibiza, Orkney and Lanzarote, providing fresh and reinvigorating inspiration to her artistic development.