Balmer started to take annual working trips to Italy in the early 1970s. Early Renaissance artists, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico and Giotto, had inspired her during her studies. The soft pastel palette of Giorgio Morandi was also important to her. Theatre of Dreams (1978) and Celebration for San Agostino (San Gimingnano) are both quintessential Italian views. These visions, if that is what they are, so carefully and delicately drawn together, are perhaps, as Professor Duncan MacMillan suggests, an evocation of an insubstantial dream. The same unsettling but dream-like quietude can be seen in Etruscan Mists, 1989: the lattice of trees preventing the dreamer from escaping into the penumbral Tuscan hills.

The almost monochromatic palette of Etruscan Mists relates to another painting so completely opposite in its subject: Triptych Bedscapes Imprint I, II and III. The bedclothes have become imaginary landscapes, and each panel mirrors the topography and mood of the other. In a recent review, Duncan MacMillan noted that ‘the paintings are also masterpieces of cubist composition as the folds evolve into intersecting planes defined by sharp lines.’

Balmer’s technical virtuosity is clear to see, and so too that her technique and style sets her apart from her contemporaries. The artist’s poetic sensibilities though, are perhaps best summarised by the art critic W. Gordon Smith: