16/10/2026
I was happy to give this lecture at the last minute for The Arts Society Falmouth on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and her drawings as she is a much underrated artist of incredible skill as a draftswoman and painter and as someone I knew from as far back as my student days in St. Andrew’s. It is so important to tell her story. Like so many women artists she was ignored and undermined by the male dominated art world.
STOP PRESS! A change of lecture this Friday, 16th October
Due to ill-health, Anna Moszynska is unable to deliver her lecture THE BODY AS A PLACE: THE SCULPTURE OF ANTHONY GORMLEY. While this will come as a disappointment, we hope to reschedule the lecture at a later date.
In the meantime, we are very fortunate and grateful that renowned Cornish art historian Catherine Wallace has stepped into the breach at very short notice. She will be treating us to her lecture THE DRAWINGS OF W BARNS GRAHAM CBE: FORM, LINE AND LANDSCAPE FROM ST IVES TO LANZAROTE.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is known as a painter of abstract work and part of the Modernist group of artists in St. Ives. Throughout her life she practiced the discipline of drawing which she used to inform her paintings and to explore different ideas. These drawings are important works in their own right and in this lecture Catherine Wallace highlights some of the main themes that reflect Barns Graham’s journey through life.
From her figure studies at Art School in Edinburgh in the 1930s, her drawings of the camouflage factory where she worked in St. Ives during World War II; her constructivist drawings of glaciers in Switzerland in the late 1940s; her landscapes of Italy in the mid 50s ; the line drawings and rhythmic patterns she made back in St. Ives in the 1970s; the accurate line drawings of buildings in St. Ives and Stromness, Orkney in the 1980s to some of her most dynamic drawings of volcanic rock on the island of Lanzarote in the 1990s.
The lecture will commence at 10.30 am at the Princess Pavilion 41 Melville Road Falmouth; arrival time from 09.45 am please. New members and guests are very welcome. For more information see www.theartssocietyfalmouth.org
