Porthmeor was arguably Barns-Graham's most popular subject. It was here that she rented her first studio after moving to Cornwall in 1940. The town was an artistic hub, home to the St Ives Society of Artists as well as to a growing number of moderns including Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Barns-Graham quickly made it her creative centre.  This work came after two significant exhibitions for Wilhelmina Barns-Graham; the 1977 Tate exhibition of fourteen artists from St Ives, and another Tate exhibition also in that year entitled 'Art in Cornwall 1945 - 55'. The accompanying catalogue for the later exhibition was effectively the first outline history of Modernism in St Ives.  With its muted palette and clean lines, this work is an example of Barns Graham's feeling for simple, direct shape and form. The complexity of the natural world is reduced using single lines which build the image. The work shows Barns-Graham at the peak of her linear period, which ran from the 1970s to the mid 1980s, when her paintings became dramatically geometric, using solid blocks of vivid clashing colour. The linearity of this work recalls in particular her 1970s seascapes such as Full Tide (1975), Breaker (1976) and Glacier Knot (1978).