The highly personal Xmas Square, executed in gouache and pencil on paper in 1979, was created for Barns-Graham’s great friends the sculptor Denis Mitchell and his wife Jane Stevens. It acts as a bridge between her earlier works and those of the late 1990s and early 2000s presented here. They represent the creative finale of her long and prolific career. Working with acrylic on paper, Geevor No.1 of 1997 is one of several examples of the artist using those materials. It comes from the artist’s Scorpio Series ‘of gestural, abstract
images, in which bold brushstrokes carry saturated colour’. (Lynne Green, W. Barns-Graham: A Studio Life, Farnham, 2011, p.267).
The following screenprints, including Construction Series I of 2006, are a testament to the working relationship Barns-Graham established with Carol Robertson of Graal Press. As Ann Gunn has explained, together they created a ‘dictionary’ of brush marks in a range of colours printed onto sheets of clear PVC. Barns-Graham would experiment with them to achieve the right positions, colour combinations and opacity
or transparency to achieve the multi-faceted harmony of the resultant prints. (Ann V. Gunn, The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Complete Catalogue, Aldershot, 2007, p.53). Some of them were editioned posthumously following the artist’s death in St Andrew’s in 2004, at the age of ninety-one.
