Background
She was born in Shillong, Eastern Bengal and Assam, British India.
( In The Living Stones, the British surrealist painter an...)
In The Living Stones, the British surrealist painter and writer Ithell Colquhoun drifts through Cornwall in search of an artist’s studio and sanctuary from the modern world. Her finely wrought and learned observations of festivals, fairs and druidic rituals, quickly establish her as the reader’s gnostic guide to the county. She paints a land of ghosts, pedlars, borrowed saints and holy sites, charmed wells and crumbling megaliths, and finds in the city emigrants a prefiguring of hippie culture. Above all, Colquhoun connects us with the eerie, numinous beauty of the Cornish countryside, quietly insisting that we see the Cornwall she sees: an ancient land of myth and legend.
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( The heroine of this story (described only as "I") is co...)
The heroine of this story (described only as "I") is compelled to visit a mysterious uncle who turns out to be a black magician who lords over a kind of Prospero's Island that exists out of time and space. Startled by his bizarre behavior and odd nocturnal movements, she eventually learns that he is searching for the philosopher's stone. When his sinister attentions fall upon the priceless jewel heirloom in her possession, bewilderment turns into stark terror and she realizes she must find a way off the island. An esoteric dreamworld fantasy composed of uncorrelated scenes and imagery mostly derived from medieval occult sources, Goose of Hermogenes might be described as a gothic novel, an occult picaresque, or a surrealist fantasy. However one wants to approach this obscure tale, it remains today as vividly unforgettable and disturbing as when it was first published by Peter Owen in 1961.
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She was born in Shillong, Eastern Bengal and Assam, British India.
She studied at the Slade School of Art in London, and later travelled to France to study the Surrealist masters, especially Salvador Dalí.
From the 1930s to her death, her work was exhibited widely in Britain and Germany. However she was actually expelled from the London Surrealist Group for not giving her unconditional support to East.L.T. Mesens in 1940. Best known for her paintings, Colquhoun invented new Surrealist techniques, including graphomania, stillomania, and parsemage.
She was also an author, playwright, and poet.
Throughout her life she was deeply interested in the occult, especially the Kabbalistic tree of life. Her bibliography includes The Sword of Wisdom, New York: G.P. Putnam"s Sons, 1975, which was the first book-length biography of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.
lieutenant remains the longest single work specifically focused on Mathers. She also published an occult novel, The Goose of Hermogenes.
A recent book of her Collected Magical Writings has been published posthumously.
Colquhoun died of heart failure in the Menwinnion Country House Hotel, Lamorna, Cornwall on 11 April 1988. lieutenant is frequently written that she died in a fire at her studio, but this was not southern
( The heroine of this story (described only as "I") is co...)
( In The Living Stones, the British surrealist painter an...)
(, 204 pages, with line drawings)
Her early membership to the Golden Dawn was rejected, but she later became a member of the Typhonian O.T.O, another prominent occult order.