Lanzarote

A working holiday

Each year from 1989-1993, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham traveled to Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. Her trips were usually in February and March, and she stayed on the island for three or four weeks each time. Friends, including fellow St Ives artists Jane and Tony O’Malley, had recommended Lanzarote to Barns-Graham, and whether-or-not she initially travelled to the islands with a more relaxing stay in mind, the intoxicating, dramatic landscapes soon took hold, and so the trips became known as “work-holidays” (WBG/4/1/55/24).

Barns-Graham’s first trip to Lanzarote, in 1989, was largely an exploration of the island, which is evident in her work from that year. She made drawings and paintings of a wide variety of subjects ranging from the balcony of the home she was staying in, several villages around the island, and the horseshoe-shaped vineyards in La Geria. Though these subjects varied more than those of her subsequent trips, themes from this first trip were sustained between 1990-1993.

Past work

There are echoes of previous works made by Barns-Graham in her Lanzarote drawings. The way she engaged with the dramatic, volcanic landscape was not unlike the way she had engaged with the landscapes in Italy, or Spain and the Balearics in the 1950s. Though she did not explicitly refer to these experiences while she was in Lanzarote, the confident lines marking jagged rocks and geometric features of the land can be traced across drawings that were made by Barns-Graham during each of these excursions.

Echoes of the series of gouaches made by Barns-Graham after she holidayed on the Balearic Islands in 1958 can also be found in Lanzarote works. She was again exploring themes of abstracting the landscape and representing the earth through colour rather than representational shape. Similarly, the colours she used are rich and dark, evoking Lanzarote’s volcanic nature and the dark soil on the island.

Lava Rock

In her later trips, Barns-Graham engaged further with her interest in the rugged forms of the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote. She devoted more time to drawing various lava formations across the island.  Most notably in 1992 and 1993, she focused on capturing the island’s volcanic rock forms. In fact, in 1993, this was her only subject. She didn’t paint or draw anything else. The lava rock drawings are almost abstract; they demonstrate Barns-Graham’s interest in the sculpted shapes of the landscape.

Black Paper

During her trips to Lanzarote, Barns-Graham began to use white chalk on black paper, usually to depict the island’s lava rock formations. These white chalk works on black paper were a further expression of her career-long interests in landscape and the abstract. In her travel diary, she referred to her use of this paper as a colour study (WBG/4/1/50/6); she also described how the black of the paper brought out the black hues of the land. There is no denying the visual similarities between the black paper and the dark, volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote. The use of this new material demonstrates Barns-Graham’s appetite for the continued exploration of colour into her later years. Though it is not uncommon for artists to use black paper in landscape subjects, Barns-Graham’s adoption of the black paper demonstrates how her way of looking at a more traditional subject evolved even late into her career.

La Geria

Barns-Graham was also particularly interested in the wine-making region of the island. La Geria was an inspiration to her throughout the years that she visited Lanzarote. With winding roads through fields of horseshoe-shaped divots in the land, La Geria contained much interest for Barns-Graham, she described it as “magnificent” (WBG/4/1/50/7). In fact, she wrote to Rowan James that this part of the island “interests me most” (WBG/1/4/17/4).
Because the landscape in La Geria was so difficult to walk on, Barns-Graham usually drew from the road. Many of her La Geria pieces show a field leading up to a mountain. They are often foreshortened, the distance between the viewer and the mountain flattened.

Conclusion

Barns-Graham came to Lanzarote later in life, but the inspiration she found in its landscape and culture proved to shape a key part of her career. Taking a different travel companion each time, and socialising with friends and locals while she was there, for four years, working holidays became an important and much needed interruption to her annual rhythm of moving between St Andrews and St Ives. Many of the themes that she experimented with earlier in her career returned in her Lanzarote work.