As a documentarian, Mark Cousins has always been fascinated by ways of seeing, by distinctive perspectives on the world. Perhaps this is why his latest film, a poetic cine-essay about the Scottish modernist painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), is among his most satisfying and inquiring. Willie, as she preferred to be called, saw the world slightly differently. She had synaesthesia – letters, words and numbers evoked specific colours for her – but she also had an agile, associative mind that found links and kinship where others might not.
Willie drew inspiration from the light at St Ives in Cornwall (she was part of a 1940s group of artists) and from the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland, as well as from mathematical patterns and grids. And the work she created, foregrounded here at the expense of biographical background detail, is intricate and fiercely intelligent.
In UK and Irish cinemas
