Born in St Andrews in Fife, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) is one of the UK’s greatest, if most unsung, abstract artists. “Painting chose me, not I it,” she once said of her vocation after she experienced a life-changing moment on top of a glacier high in the Swiss Alps. Now, she is the subject of the latest feature documentary from visionary Edinburgh-based director Mark Cousins.
The new documentary, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, produced by Adam Dawtrey and Mary Bell, is one of the most high profile projects presented at this week’s MeetMarket at Sheffield DocFest.
“She is not very well known… but the people with a good eye clocked her. For example, David Bowie collected her work,” Cousins enthuses about his subject. He himself first saw one of her glacier pictures in the late 1980s and has loved her art ever since. In fact, he sees many parallels between her work and his own documentaries.
One constant theme in Cousins’ own films is “[the process of] looking – how do people look distinctively, how do people look originally?”
The director regards the new film about Barns-Graham as the perfect companion pieces to his 2017 documentary The Eyes Of Orson Welles. “One of the things I said [about Welles] is that he was the greatest looker upwards, with all those low camera angles… Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is the counter to this. She was brilliant at looking down. When she went to Venice, she didn’t look at the buildings. When she went to Switzerland, she didn’t look at the Alps. All her art is about a kind of looking down into the earth. That is what is really distinctive.”
Barns-Graham’s father strongly disapproved of her desire to be an artist – and there is an element of feminist rebelliousness in her story. She was synesthetic. That’s a term for when the senses are jumbled up – when you see sound and hear colour. For her, the letter ‘A’ was pale brown and the letter ‘B’ was sunset yellow.
“I have mathematical tendencies myself. I was always rubbish at lots of things but super good at mathematics and further mathematics and the abstract bits. When I looked at her work, I really felt a kindred soul.”
Cousins was also intrigued by the filmic possibilities that Barns-Graham offered as a character. In photographs, she looks like “a wee old lady, the sort of lady you would see drinking tea and eating a cheese scone after a car boot sales. And yet, when you look inside her imagination, you encounter this kind of Leonardo Da Vinci untrammeled thing where science and art, left and right, all combine.”
Barns-Graham may look “very ordinary” but the documentary takes viewers into her fantastical inner world. The key experience in the artist’s life came when she climbed a glacier in the Swiss Alps in the late 1940s. “It changed her life. It was a Joycean epiphany. For 50 years, she painted what she saw on that day,” Cousins notes of what the artist experienced on the Grindelwald Glacier, beneath the north face of the Eiger.
The title of the film, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Thing, comes from a line in her diary describing her experience on the glacier. “It feels like you can see into them and they feel alive,” Cousins describes his own experience with glaciers. Her fascination was on both a geological and spiritual level. It seemed to her as if the glacier would be there forever. In fact, within 70 years, it had shrunk almost out of existence due to climate change.
“It was huge when she climbed it and had this life-changing experience. I climbed the Alps recently to find it. You have to walk for two hours before you even get to the tiny bit of what is left of it,” says the director.
Cousins has filmed in some scary places – Sarajevo when it was under siege and Iraq during the war among them. He says, though, that being on the glacier ranks with his most terrifying experiences.
Barns-Graham later became part of the famed St Ives School. She headed to Cornwall partly to escape her father and partly because it was warmer there than in Scotland – and she suffered from poor health.
As a very prolific filmmaker himself, Cousins was strongly attracted to the formidable work ethic shared by Barns-Graham, who lived for a very long time, from 1912 until 2004, and kept on creating right till the end. “She would do three art works a day – and I have tendencies in that direction,” Cousins explains their affinity. “That unstoppability, that will to form, that leap to make stuff, she really had that. The energy of the woman is exciting!”
Support for the film has come from the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust and its director Rob Airey. “They have given me access to her paintings, her photographs, her art materials, her clothes. It’s unique access. Because she was neurodiverse, like many neurodiverse people she obsessively catalogued her own life. There are diaries that show every time she took communion in church…she is a dream in a way [for a filmmaker] because she catalogued everything.”
This isn’t a straight biographical account of its subject’s life. It’s isn’t about the St Ives arts scene or how women are written out of art history. Its focus is much more specific. “I’ve decided what it’s really about is the relationship between her brain and the glacier…I say at one point of the film, the glacier was 10,000 years old, her brain was 39 years old and they met one day.” When you cut between brain scans and images of glaciers, Cousins notes, you start to see visual equivalents between the two.
Much of the documentary is already shot. Editing will take place over the summer. Cousins is also currently putting together an art installation inspired by Barns-Graham at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, due to open in November.
“Part of the documentary will include Mark’s process creating the installation in Edinburgh,” producer Adam Dawtrey explains.
Cousins works around the world, his films are widely feted on the festival circuit and he recently won a European Film Award for Innovative Storytelling. Barns-Graham also had an international reputation. It’s likely that the new doc, which is already supported by the Barns-Graham Trust, will have both Scottish and European backing.
During MeetMarket in Sheffield, the producers will be meeting potential financiers, speaking to broadcasters and having further conversations with sales agents.
