Ithell Colquhoun
‘Attributes of the Moon’, 1947, courtesy Tate
Not long ago the Tate Gallery announced the acquisition of an archive of about five thousand sketches, drawings, and artworks by Ithell Colquhoun, which was added to the occult work that had already been bequeathed to the same institution by the artist; the National Trust, the original owners of the archive, decided that it would make sense to have them housed in the one place. Together, the holdings now form the largest study collection in the Tate, which is perhaps a little surprising, as Colquhoun is not especially well-known or highly regarded.
She was nevertheless an interesting British surrealist, some of whose images are remarkably odd and occasionally sinister. The techniques Colquhoun employed were also off-beat: as well as her fondness for automatism, a process in which the artist surrendered conscious control over what she was creating, she also experimented with ‘fumage’, using a candle’s smoke to make shapes on surfaces, and ‘decalcomania’, a process in which shapes and subjects are suggested by pressing paint within two sheets or folds of paper. Despite these obvious connections with mainstream surrealism, she was eventually excluded from the British Surrealist Group because she wouldn’t sever her many associations with occultism.
Drawn to strong intuitive connections with people and places, Ithell Colquhoun never forgot her early years in India, where she was born, and always felt tied to its culture and spirituality. She was sent back to England at a young age, had little formal schooling, and was unusual and precocious enough at the age of ten to have imagined God as a hermaphrodite, a fusion of Jesus with Mary. She later spent some time in Cheltenham Lady’s College, went on to the school of art in the same town, and then to the Slade in London. Her main interests lay in biology, sexuality and gender, and especially in psychology and dreams.
At first Colquhoun was reasonably successful as a painter, but in time, as her exhibitions became fewer, Colquhoun became more deeply involved with occult circles than with the art world. She joined many groups, undertook various initiations, and spent much of her time alone in Cornwall, where she rented a hut with a corrugated iron roof and no electricity or plumbing. In her book The Living Stones, she described Lamorna, the place where she lived, as a ‘valley of streams and moon-leaves, wet scents and all that cries with the owl’s voice, all that flies with a bat’s wing’. She later moved to a cottage in the village of Paul, inland from Mousehole, immersing herself in the activities of occult organisations and writing her arcane gothic novel, The Goose of Hermogenes.
Colquhoun was close to her Celtic roots - her father’s family came from Scotland, and her mother was of Irish descent - and this was one of the reasons why she moved to Cornwall. Her first book, The Crying of the Wind, was about her travels in Ireland, where she hoped to turn her back on the modern world and discover something of an archaic pre-Christian world. This quest, it need hardly be said, was not altogether fulfilling, but another tentative connection with Ireland took place some years later, when she joined the ‘Fellowship of Isis’, founded in 1976 by Olivia Durdin Robertson and her brother Lawrence. The Fellowship, which had its temple and headquarters in Huntington Castle in Clonegal, Co. Carlow, was open to people of all faiths who wanted to acknowledge the Divine Feminine. No vows were required, and all activities and devotions were optional. The eccentric Robertsons, who had a longstanding interest in the esoteric and spiritual, began to initiate priestesses straight away, and it was possible to do so at a distance. Colquhoun seems to have become a priestess in this way, but although there is a record of the offerings she made to the Goddess on the occasion, it is not clear how committed she was to the Fellowship.
Indeed, Colquhoun was involved in so many spiritual and occult groups (among them ‘The Golden Dawn’, which included among its members W.B.Yeats and Maud Gonne, as well as Aleister Crowley), that it is hard to identify her core beliefs. In broad terms, however, she appears to have believed that the earth is alive and that everything is imbrued with spirit; above all, she wanted to experience and unite with the divine. There was nonetheless a dark side to her beliefs, which were often as disquieting and unsettling as they were benign.
In that light, it is interesting to consider Colquhoun’s life story in relation to Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s entertaining novel, Lolly Willowes, the tale of a young middle-class Englishwoman who suddenly breaks free from the clutches of her controlling family and chooses to live on her own in a small village in the countryside, where she becomes a witch. Towards the end of the book, Lolly meets the Devil, who appears in the guise of a gardener. During a conversation with him, she tellingly remarks that ‘the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull’ - which is something that could never be said of her, nor of the extraordinary Ithell Colquhoun.
For further exploration:
Ithell Colquhoun: http://www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk/; https://drawingroom.org.uk/resources/magician-born-of-nature-the-life-and-work-of-ithell-colquhoun
The Durdin-Robertsons: https://www.ria.ie/ga/node/98363
Lolly Willowes: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/15/100-best-novels-lolly-willowes-sylvia-townsend-warner-robert-mccrum
‘Gorgon’, 1946, courtesy private collection