Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interview afterwards with director Mark Cousins which has been uploaded to YouTube (I can see myself in the audience!) The documentary turns on an epiphany she had at Grindelwald Glacier, while holidaying in Switzerland in 1949. Tilda Swinton reads the quote about her ‘terrifying desire’ to roll down the mountain that I included in a post about Barns-Graham I wrote here six years ago. I’ve always thought of her glacier paintings as a facet of modernist landscape painting but perhaps I shouldn’t really be talking about her at all on this blog, because as Cousins points out she wasn’t looking up at the Alpine landscape, she was looking down at the ice. Numerous paintings and drawing examine the structure, light and translucent colours of the glacier and a new book edited by Rob Airey has just been published dedicated to these. The variations she found over the years are shown in one of the highlights of the film, a long sequence that just just puts these glacier pictures on screen one after the other in an old fashioned slide show, accompanied by Linda Buckley’s music.
A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things won top prize at the Karlovy Vary film festival this year and I would love to have asked Mark Cousins about it, because earlier this year we visited this extraordinary old spa town on holiday. But we were actually there on a Grand Budapest Hotel pilgrimage and I’m sure he would have had no interest in talking about award ceremonies and a place that has nothing to do with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham! Another place he didn’t talk much about was St. Ives and the art colony she’s always been associated with – as he says in a BFI interview, this is limiting for a painter who saw herself as an independent ‘lone wolf’. Cousins thinks there are three particular reasons why 21st century audiences may be interested in her art: climate change (so evident at Grindelwald), the contemporary focus on relatively neglected female figures and her neurodiversity. This last aspect is really his central theme – A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a portrait of the artist’s ‘brain’. It includes some beautifully shot footage of her obsessively compiled notebooks, where she explored the mathematics of colour combinations. All in all I think it’s an excellent film that sidesteps the familiar approaches of an arts documentary. Peter Bradshaw gave it a four star review in The Guardian yesterday. His article starts with a photograph of Barns-Graham out sketching in the landscape, so maybe it’s not too inappropriate to talk about her again here.
From the official trailer for A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things
