A rogue preposition within the title betrays this movie’s distinctive, dartingly eccentric idiom: not “of deeper issues” however “to deeper issues”. It’s about uncared for summary painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, born in Scotland in 1912 and a resident of St Ives, whose landscapes she represented with limitless curiosity and keenness; she died in 2004. Movie-maker Mark Cousins makes an idiosyncratic however compellingly persuasive case for this artist to be restored (or actually launched for the primary time) to the pantheon of accepted greatness, with Tilda Swinton giving us Barns-Graham in voiceover.
The movie grew out of a Barns-Graham set up Cousins curated in Edinburgh; the title is taken from her diaries, recording her ecstatic encounter with the Grindelwald glaciers in Switzerland within the late Forties, whose kinds and colors revolutionised her life and artwork, and took her imaginative and prescient into an intriguing house outdoors the purely summary. She actually known as it “a sudden glimpse into deeper issues”, which sounds a bit much less eccentric. (It might need been extra elegant to name it simply A Sudden Glimpse, although that sounds misleadingly Hockneyesque.)
With a playful process of his personal, bringing elements of himself into the body (although not his face), Cousins muses over Barns-Graham’s id and her inventive mind; he additionally feedback on images of the older Barns-Graham, noting the overall observer she might need appeared like a stereotypical outdated girl. Then he upends that condescension by exhibiting us an image of Barns-Graham in her prime: a blazingly lovely, charismatic determine whose gaze meets the digital camera with a peaceful confidence. She maybe has one thing grandly Bohemian and nearly Bloomsbury-ish in her method which went out of fashion; amusingly, Cousins exhibits us the later Barns-Graham with a bunch of older people within the Nineteen Sixties who have been a part of a spiritual pilgrimage, noting that they don’t look very cool or with-it – however he reasonably brilliantly means that her personal later summary canvases are like songs the Beatles made in the direction of the tip of their recording life. It’s a comparability that may’t be proved both manner, however I believe I see it, too.
One among Cousins’s beginning factors is personally coming into possession of a portray attributed to Barns-Graham, however whose signature appears incorrect and which doesn’t seem within the catalogues. Its kinds appear like an Escher design or just like the grid illustrations in On Progress and Type by the mathematical biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose work Barns-Graham admired. The origin of Cousins’s portray would possibly stay a thriller, however Barns-Graham’s personal mesmeric colour-grid designs have been maybe an affect on Gerhard Richter. Later, Cousins exhibits us a succession of fascinating canvases by Barns-Graham and leaves it as much as us to note the debt to Picasso, though he explicitly denies her alleged resemblance to Barbara Hepworth; the work, he says, is “extra primal than simply the affect of artwork”.
Characteristically, Cousins injects a observe of wayward invention; he imagines what Barns-Graham was considering whereas flashing up a few of her work onscreen, and even devises a type of dialogue between her youthful and older self. (He did one thing related with Alfred Hitchcock.) Once more, solely Cousins might get away with it – and he does so due to his actual, overwhelming rapture at her work; related, maybe, to the over-oxygenated euphoria he exhibits Barns-Graham experiencing within the glacier.
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