Pink

Mel Gooding comments, 'Barns-Graham visited Switzerland in May, 1949, and spent some time drawing and sketching on the Grindelwald Glacier, under the towering North Face of the Eiger. Enthralled not only by the spectacle but impressed deeply by the immense power of the underlying forces at work in their constant shifting and shaping of the ice, she found there the subject for which her art had been preparing: physical forms of awe-inspiring beauty and the presence, sensed at all times, of glacial energy, its slow translucency ... she later wrote (in a letter to the Tate Gallery in 1965) about this experience on the glacier and the work that came from it: 'At Grindelwald I was climbing on the two glaciers 'Upper' and 'Lower'. The massive strength and size of the glaciers, the fantastic shapes, the contrast of solidity and transparency, the many reflected colours in the strong light ... This likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid rough ridges made me wish to combine all in a work all angles at once, from above, through, and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience. Using a method of drawing sharp lines in oil, intersecting lines that could be seen from several experiences at one time ... The later paintings become more "abstracted" more intersecting lines as such, colour not used literally, sky as brown, ice as pink, but they still remain abstractions having a landscape quality whatever colour is used' (see 'Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Study in Three Movements', exhibition catalogue, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Movement and Light Imag(in)ing Time, St Ives, Tate Gallery, 2005, pp. 12-3).