Mark Cousins on his portrait of a neglected painter: “Once you’re infected by an artist’s work, it’s timeless”

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things opens on a portrait of an old woman – “outdoorsy” is how Mark Cousins describes her in his softly spoken narration. He describes her appearance from a distance, inviting us to question his narrative – and our perception – about her age and looks before uncovering a colourised photograph of her spectacularly beautiful and younger self. 

Winner of the top prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Cousins’ new documentary examines the work and mind of this woman, the little-known 20th-century British modernist painter Wilhelmina ‘Willie’ Barns-Graham. It’s his second major portrait of an artist, following The Eyes of Orson Welles, Cousins’ 2018 documentary about the great filmmaker’s paintings and drawings. 



Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews, Fife in 1912, and we learn from Cousins’ film that she was raised in a conservative home, with a dominant father figure. In 1940 she moved to St Ives in Cornwall where she had a studio for decades and became a prominent member of the post-war St Ives group of artists, also including Margaret Mellis, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. Yet her work has been largely forgotten and, astonishingly, it is little seen. 

To a haunting, elegiac soundtrack composed by Linda Buckley, Cousins paints the portrait of an artist who defied the art establishment. He does this by returning to her writings (narrated by Tilda Swinton) on art and as a traveller, including her visit to the now vanished lower Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland, which would have an enormous impact on her work. “The Grindelwald glacier has shrunk at least 2 kilometres since the 70s,” Cousins’ narration explains, yet Willie Barns-Graham’s vast and neglected body of work holds evidence of its form, colour patterns and barren landscape.

 

Georgia Korossi: When did you first encounter the work of Willie Barns-Graham?



Mark Cousins: There was an exhibition in 1989 at the City Art Centre here in Edinburgh, and I just absolutely adored her work. By that stage, her reputation was beginning to be recovered, as it were, after years of her being ignored. I’ve always been a visual person, and once you’re infected by an artist’s work, it’s timeless. For me, it was Willie Barns-Graham, Orson Welles, Agnès Varda… You don’t forget the first time you read Clarice Lispector or Virginia Woolf’s diaries. And you don’t forget the first time you see Paul Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. They’re always there. Willie was always there.

How did you manage access to Willie’s body of work? Did you have a connection in the art world?

It was a pure social media thing. One day I drove up to St Andrews, just to see, like a nosy person, where she lived. This was four and a half years ago. And I took a photograph of me holding Lynne Green’s book [W. Barns-Graham: A Studio Life] outside her house, saying, “Look where I am.” The [Wilhelmina Barns-Graham] Trust saw that, but I’d never had any contact with them. I think they noticed how many followers I had on social media, and they invited me to see her work, including all her paintings, clothes and jewellery. If I wasn’t obsessed [with her] previously, I was after that. I had done a film previously on the drawings and paintings of Orson Welles, so this wouldn’t be the first film I made about an artist, and I think it was in the first meeting where I said, “Maybe I could make a film.”



Do you have a favourite film about art and artists?



There are loads, and a lot of them are quite conventional and formulaic. I loved the famous Henri-Georges Clouzot film on Picasso [The Mystery of Picasso, 1956], where we see Picasso drawing. My favourite film about an artist of all time is an Indian film by Mani Kaul. It’s called Siddeshwari [1990].
 When I think of the films about art that I like, they’re seldom biographical, and these films, which are non-formulaic, broaden the genre and remind us that you don’t have to do interviews and talk to other art historians to make a film about an artist. A film about art can be a lyric cruise.



How did you map out the visual aspect of your film?



When I start, I always do a sketch of the film. This would be less than an hour’s work, and so that goes on the wall of the edit suite and we edit from that. We start with the idea from a distance, we end with the idea from a distance. At the beginning, I wanted to start with the prejudice that a lot of people have about older women. How could this little old lady with grey hair and very old-fashioned clothes be a major visual thinker? 

So, I knew that the film needed to be circular. And then, I needed it to be wide. I seldom use the CinemaScope format, but I wanted to in this case. I always shoot my own films. When I travel, including the Alps, I bring two cameras and three or four lenses and a couple of tripods. But the key thing for me was to shoot the paintings at high res, so for that we used 6K or 8K cameras. When she went to the glacier, she obviously had a sublime experience. She was terrified [being] surrounded by all that kind of thing, and yet she made these small artworks. I wanted to go back into that, to enter and recreate the sublime in some way, and I wanted on a movie screen for these small paintings to be 10,000 times as big as they are in real life.



Did you try to avoid talking about the St Ives circle of artists and Willie’s relationship with the group?

Yes, I did try to avoid it, because there’s been an awful lot [about] St Ives – artists grouped there because of the war, the light and other things. But it became a kind of brand in the art world, and when you’ve got a really distinct figure, like Willie, who kept saying, “I’m a lone wolf,” then I wanted to respect her individuality more. Barbara Hepworth has had her dues. A lot of the others have been celebrated. And yes, I could have shown the connection between her and the other St Ives artists. But if I wanted to put Willie in a broader context, I would also look more at Joan Miró; she was very influenced by Spanish art, for example. There are lots of contexts in which I could have put her, but I decided to try and do a portrait of her brain, and not the more art historical approach.

In 1950 Hepworth had her work in the Venice Biennale and in the 1951 Festival of Britain. But at that point Barns-Graham was ascending the Swiss glaciers, and on returning she’s seen focusing on her paintings without engaging with the scene. Why do you think that is?

It’s interesting you mentioned the Festival of Britain. She did want galleries to show her work. She did live in London for a while. She did understand that her work needed to be seen, but she was not obsessed by that. There was an inner dynamic, which is very admirable. Lynne Green says what she admires most about Willie was her grit, her dynamo, her determination. And that’s why she kept going so long in her life, her determination to keep working, despite what people said.



When I made my Orson Welles film, Orson Welles was the great artist of looking upwards – think Citizen Kane (1941), the cameras are low, looking up. Willie was the great artist of looking downwards at her feet in rock pools and rock formations and things. Her eyes often were not at horizon level. And that’s part of her… introversion is maybe not the right word, because apparently, she was good fun at a party and liked flirting with people. But I think she was not distracted so much by some of the things.



Is this the right time for her work to be discovered and loved?

I think in the 21st century, in the era where as feminists we’re looking back to see who was written out, and in the era of climate emergency, there’s a whole new movement called neuroarthistory, where we’re looking back at art history to ask: in the light of what we know about neuroscience, are there other ways of describing and thinking about the work of the greatest artists? And as she was neurodiverse, there are these three reasons: feminism, climate and neuroscience. It feels as if her moment is now for people to really discover this artist.

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is in cinemas from 18 October.

Find out more at the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust.