The work of the late Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is brought to life by this idiosyncratically persuasive Mark Cousins film
A rogue preposition in the title betrays this film’s distinctive, dartingly eccentric idiom: not “of deeper things” but “to deeper things”. It is about neglected abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, born in Scotland in 1912 and a resident of St Ives, whose landscapes she represented with endless curiosity and passion; she died in 2004. Film-maker Mark Cousins makes an idiosyncratic but compellingly persuasive case for this artist to be restored (or in fact introduced for the first time) to the pantheon of accepted greatness, with Tilda Swinton giving us Barns-Graham in voiceover.
The film grew out of a Barns-Graham installation Cousins curated in Edinburgh; the title is taken from her diaries, recording her ecstatic encounter with the Grindelwald glaciers in Switzerland in the late 1940s, whose forms and colours revolutionised her life and art, and took her vision into an intriguing space outside the purely abstract. She in fact called it “a sudden glimpse into deeper things”, which sounds a bit less eccentric. (It might have been more elegant to call it just A Sudden Glimpse, though that sounds misleadingly Hockneyesque.)
