John Mackechnie MBE RSA - Director - Glasgow Print Studio speaks about the exhibition by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : Painting & Printing, 1990-2004<br /><br />Glasgow Print Studio<br /><br />Exhibition runs: 05 August - 01 October 2022<br /><br />Glasgow Print Studio is delighted to present an exhibition of paintings and<br />prints by the late Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.<br /><br />Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912 - 2004) was first and foremost a painter, but she made prints<br />throughout her working life, trying many different methods such as etching, linocut, lithography and<br />screenprinting. All her published prints were made in collaboration with master printmakers. Their<br />technical expertise was essential, enabling her to translate her way of working into a different medium.<br />Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews in 1912, and studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1931 to<br />1937. She settled in St Ives in Cornwall in 1940, where she found a well-established artistic<br />community, which was also beginning to attract a new generation of artists, such as Ben Nicholson<br />and Barbara Hepworth. For the next sixty years she lived and worked in St Ives. However, in 1960<br />she inherited Balmungo, a house on the edge of St Andrews, and after that she spent a part of every<br />year in Scotland, affirming herself as a Scottish artist as much as a Cornish one.<br />During the last 10 or so years of her long artistic career, printmaking became a central part of<br />Barns-Graham’s practice, particularly after 1998 when she began working with Graal Press, Roslin,<br />near Edinburgh. Earlier prints such as a group of screenprints made with Kip Gresham at Curwen<br />Studio in 1991 and three etchings she made with Rachel Kantaris in St Ives in 1996 were often based<br />on existing original works. She was encouraged by the successful way in which her images could be<br />translated into print form, and intrigued by the possibilities for making original works in this medium.<br />Later, working with Graal Press’s Carol Robertson on a series of over 60 screenprints, these were<br />mostly entirely original - envisaged and made purely as prints – though a conversation with ongoing<br />painting series was often maintained.
