Barbara Balmer: Illusionist

Balmer produced work over five decades. She taught and exhibited across Scotland, and many of her paintings feature in public collections, some of her best are in Glasgow Museums. Latterly, she has slipped from public notice, but she never quite achieved the reputation she deserved, even in life. Born in Birmingham, she moved to Scotland by way of a scholarship from Coventry School of Art that took her to Edinburgh College of Art (1949-1953). Her contemporaries are a roll call of familiar names of Scottish art: Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston and Frances Walker to name a few. Balmer, however, eschewed the expressive brushwork and vibrant palette of the time and developed her own unique visual vocabulary.

Her quiet, often large-scale oils, belie a poetry of mood. Their stillness gives way to a range of emotions: from nostalgia to unease. Night, a surreal vision of a garden by moonlight, balances an abstract sense of pattern with a delicate air of elegy. This dreamlike vision is even more heightened in Little May Tree, 1973, which captures a nocturnal enchantment that takes the viewer back to childhood. In Voyage of the Creeper, 1974, a mesmerising labyrinth of vines overtakes the roof of a house, evoking a similar feeling of disquiet.

Windows are often used by Balmer as a compositional device of a frame within the frame, either to capture a view, or against which to set a still life. In White Window, 1966, her ability to layer patterns is particularly evident: the prolific umbrella plants overtake the astrigalled window, behind which confetti-like snow falls, highlighted against an old yew tree.