WILHELMINA Barns-Graham CBE is still painting with youthful joie de vivre in her 91st year.

"One deals with age day by day. I try to paint daily, beginning in meditation," says the Scottish abstract painter who for 61 years has lived in the artist haven of St Ives, Cornwall, but still returns to her St Andrews roots each year.

Her latest exhibition, a touring show by the suitably joyful title of Painting As Celebration, brings together around 50 fresh works from the past 15 years, peppered with one wall of earlier pieces that inform her present creativity.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie to her friends was, and remains, a primary force in the Modernist abstract movement that put St Ives and its wonderful Cornish blue light on the global art map. With its circles and lines and pungent, nursery school-bold use of colour, hers is the kind of art that has the sniffy saying: "I can do better than that" but the art cognoscenti in raptures with her "infallible sculpting of nature's living geometry".

Abstract painting always will divide opinion but Barns-Graham relishes the chance to make more of less: an act of refinement and discipline combining spontaneity of brush stroke with mathematical planning that does not show its face on the canvas or, in her case, white paper.

"People mustn't be anxious or worry about understanding it all," she says with gentle humour.

Her paintings, in acrylics or gouache, are irrepressibly energetic, exuberant, and save for 1998's overpowering Jupiter's Dream, uncluttered. She champions expressionism over realism and seeks to create forms that live and dance in space, breaking free of the strictures of portraiture and such like.

Her wall quotes are as inspiring and refreshing as her artwork in its fresh, linen-white frames. "Instead of severe constrictions, I enjoy the medium and colour until the moment of excitement, held breath, when the work appears to speak and sing."

If they speak, it is often the excited chatter of a happy gathering, although the red and black of Untitled 28/01 and Black Movement Over Two Reds carry the foreboding of a dimming of the light as the years stack up. If they sing, then it is the sound of birdsong or the Hallelujah chorus.

"Life is so exciting, nature is so exciting," says Barns-Graham. "Trying to catch the one simple statement about it - that's what I'm aiming for. I'll keep trying."

There could be no better summary of her art.

Updated: 13:04 Thursday, March 27, 2003