My Aunt Wilhemina Barns-Graham

      My aunt Wilhelmina or 'Willie' to family and friends was a celebrated British painter and member of the St Ives School who's centenary was 2012. She died in 2004. Few people had heard of her outside the inner art sanctum (certainly in my youth when I mentioned her to artist friends) and although her CV included major galleries around the world, she received public recognition (The CBE) much later on in her twilight years. 

     Willie was the sister of my mother Jean who died having me. We were virtually the only practising creatives in the wide family apart from my late half-sister Barbara.  In her work I recognised the importance of technique and how learning the rules gives one true freedom to break away. Her early water colours were a fantastic expression of mastery of technique and indeed technique was instrumental in much of her abstract work such as using paper hole stiffeners as a collage in a particular phase in her work. 

      I am no art critic, although she once asked me my opinion about some of her last paintings and then she said 'you sound just like like the Sunday Times art critic who was down here last week'. The fact is anyone could see she was a fantastic artistic brimming with creative energy right up until shortly before her death and if any work of art truly evokes feeling then finding language to describe it is not rocket science. Perhaps equally importantly she was one of a small group of prominent women, such as Mary Goldring, who spoke on Radio Four about various topics. I recall her as a great story teller, just like my late sister Veronica Jill. 

    The point of this short comment here, is one of the apparent lottery of life and how, in misspelling her name in a letter of congratulation may possibly have cost me an inheritance to be an innovative furniture maker operating from a 'stately' home, instead of a tiny cramped basement workshop without natural light in an artisan terraced property!  Life is certainly a mystery in the cards that are dealt out:

  Willie amongst fellow painters in St Ives (circa 1947)

'Penniless artists' mentioned in the video is a generalised term based on the assumption that many artists lack the financial means to sustain their art and therefore a trust set up to help talented young people by way of offering scholarships is an entirely worthy cause.