US
It’s taken decades and the alignment of many stars, but Ithell Colquhoun’s time has finally come. The artist died in relative obscurity in 1988, having spent the second half of her long life (she was born in 1906) living and working in a studio in a Cornish valley, initially without heat or running water. But, slowly, interest in her vibrantly strange, multiform body of work revived. Prominent fans like Stewart Lee spoke about her witchy influence on their lives.
A biography by Amy Hale appeared. Tate acquired her archive of visual works. And then the trickle turned into a rush, and now Colquhoun is everywhere – in a book by Jennifer Higgie on visionary women artists, adorning a special edition of Doc Martens boots, and in a major retrospective moving from Tate St Ives to Tate Britain.
Colquhoun spent her lifetime craving acceptance and belonging, while also remaining true to her idiosyncrasies and convictions even when they cost her the community she longed for. Reading her 1955 travelogue The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, the first book she published, one can sense that her soul has spent as much time out in the cold as her body:
Original Edition, Peter Owen, 1955
Ireland is at the mercy of the elements, and a sensitive human being is at the mercy (if that is the right word) of elemental waves of feeling – angst alternates with bitterness, an insane gaiety with sorrow or timeless reverie. There are days when one feels completely lost; the whole island seems lost, doomed to be engulfed like Atlantis in mist and spray or blown away by a gale from the ocean.
Colquhoun was writing in the aftermath of a divorce – but her isolation extended to her artistic practice. Her first encounters with the Surrealist movement in the 1930s had inspired her and felt like a kind of homecoming. Here was a movement as preoccupied with the inner landscape, and as little inclined to be pigeonholed by form, as Colquhoun herself. But her interest in the occult in all its guises was stronger than her loyalty to the ‘official’ Surrealists, and she eventually broke off on her own, making art inspired by folklore, tarot, Druidic standing stones, and other traces of the spirit world found in this one. She continued to use techniques like decalcomania and other exploratory or automatic methods associated with Surrealism, but she never again had a group of artistic colleagues.
Still, Colquhoun’s life was rich with the pleasures of creativity, and layered with the spiritual meaning she found pulsing out of the world around her. She was as good a writer as she was a painter, and for all the undulating lines and abstraction of her visual practice, there is nothing imprecise about her prose.
She can be bitingly understated, as when the heroine of her novel Goose of Hermogenes finds herself given a cold welcome to her uncle’s island fortress: ‘His manner was courteous but distant; he seemed to have no need of any human relationship, and to consider enquiries about my health or journey superfluous.’ And her artist’s eye is evident when she describes the joy of a warm spring in her book about the county where she lived, The Living Stones: Cornwall:
Original Edition, Peter Owen, 1961
I have often sunbathed naked beside the stream, into which I could occasionally slip to cool myself… Here when the yellow flags were in flower on the opposite bank one could lie and watch the dragonflies making love, emerald and black or turquoise and black, their gauzy wings so heavily tipped with shadow as to make them seem more like moths.
It was her work on Cornwall that first drew me to Colquhoun as a reader. Most of my family live not far from where Colquhoun put down her roots, and I spend a large part of my time there. But until I read her work, I hadn’t believed I’d find a writer who could capture the otherworldly atmosphere, perfect light, and odd mix of austerity and lushness that characterise Britain’s western reaches.
Original Edition, Peter Owen, 1957
Now, with her major books reissued and her artworks on wider display, more and more readers and viewers are experiencing that thrill of recognition. Her talent and vision are finally receiving the attention they deserve – and which, by the account of her publisher and friend Peter Owen, she personally deserved. After her death, he wrote: ‘I miss Ithell. She was one of the few really brilliant and exceptionally talented people I ever met who was good company, genuinely unassuming and always a pleasure to be with.’ I hope she would be pleased to know she is remembered with affection and growing admiration – and perhaps she does. If anyone’s spirit is looking back from the beyond, it’s Ithell Colquhoun’s, and perhaps I will feel her one day, whirling past me over the Cornish hills.
Sofia Smith-Laing
Assistant Editor
Don’t Miss
Ithell Colquhoun – The first major exhibition | Tate Britain | 13th June – 19th October