Over 60 individual Glacier works have been identified made by Barns-Graham between 1949-52 following her visit in May 1949 to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. These works are made up of studies (on paper) of the glacier, exploratory offset drawings and about 25 finished oil paintings. Upper Glacier Theme utilises an off-set / mono-printing technique which allowed her to experiment with a particular composition without having to re-draw it from scratch. There are three different versions of this particular composition, the other two also feature painting in oil.

Through the 1950s, following the Glacier series, Barns-Graham’s work retained vestiges of landscape, with hints of horizons, sea and cliffs, though was increasingly monochromatic, hard-edged and geometric. A trip to Spain and the Balearics in 1958 led to some warmer, decidedly unCornish colours, looser paintwork and more abstract compositions. 1960’s Sandscape (Tarragona), is a good example - while still referencing place & landscape, specific features are hard to identify.

In the early years of the 1960s Barns-Graham moved away from any visual reference to the external world, particularly using squares dispersed across the picture plane in the many variations of her Things of a Kind in Order & Disorder series. Later in the decade circles entered her vocabulary of simple geometric forms, which became vehicles for movement, experiments with composition and exploration of colour relationships.

Much of Barns-Graham’s hard-edged abstraction from the late-1960s to the early 1980s utilised maths and geometry and were meticulously planned through numerous variations on graph paper, before a finished work was committed to canvas. The large group of Expanding Forms works from 1980-81 were among the final series made by Barns-Graham using this method before she would turn back towards landscape and a looser more expressive approach. Although the Expanding Forms used maths, and particularly proportion in their construction, unlike earlier works based on squares, there is a sense of landscape here, with the wind and sand of Porthmeor beach, ever present outside her home and studio, filtering into the forms and colour.

Visits to Orkney in 1984-5 and Lanzarote for five consecutive years 1989-93 placed landscape firmly back at the centre of Barns-Graham’s practice, and these works played a critical role in her transition from the hard-edged abstraction of the 1960s to early 1980s to the loose expressive brushstrokes and bold colour that characterised the last 10 years or so of her career. Scorpio Series No. 1 1995 is one the earliest examples of these works, where there are virtually no shapes or discernible forms, rather the finished work is built up from arrangements of single colour brushstrokes over more amorphous backgrounds.