Wilhelmina Barns-Graham — The Joy Project

Continuing the Art of Play
July 2, 2025

Artist: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Join Zoom Meeting / Class
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87618016665

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts.

Wikipedia

Warm-up + Project

”Primarily a painter, Barns-Graham developed her own abstract vocabulary of distinctive line, form and colour through a physical and conceptual engagement with nature. Her earlier representational work became distilled abstract forms, through direct observational drawings and watercolour. She increasingly drew on feeling, memory, sensation and the emotional properties of colour through continuous experimentation, with motifs in her visual language developing from the structures and tensions in geomorphological aspects of landscape.”

- Hales Gallery Review -

Please choose an image to work with before class begins.

We will be responding to images of nature in seeing, feeling and listening. You may choose to look out of your window. Take a photo or simply pull a picture of nature from online, a book or magazine.

After you select your image, consider how you might respond to creating an abstract representation of the scene.

You may warm-up trying various materials and then we will move on to our final project. It may be a continuation of the warm-up or a new exploration.

All materials are possibilities.