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Along with the likes of Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, the British writer and painter Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) is one of a small number of previously overlooked Surrealist women artists, whose stock today is on the rise. Colquhoun's paintings have recently featured in touring exhibitions around the UK, command ever-increasing prices at auction, and her occult travelogues of Ireland (The Crying of the Wind) and Cornwall (The Living Stones), first published in the '50s and reissued with introductions by Stewart Lee in 2016, have quickly sold through four print runs. In Medea's Charms Colquhoun's shorter writings are anthologised for the first time, and reveal the scope and sophistication of her interest in both the occult and surrealism. Poetry and short stories are complimented by her essays, the subjects of which range from hermetic texts for both the novice and the advanced practitioner, to writings on art and folklore. Colquhoun scholar Richard Shillitoe unlocks the secrets of her work, guiding the reader through the extraordinary imagination that lies at the heart of Colquhoun's genius. The book also demonstrates the extent to which Colquhoun used painting to illuminate her writing. The interplay between word and image is brought home by the inclusion of a striking selection of her paintings, some of which are reproduced here for the first time.

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9780720620221

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ITHELL COLQUHOUN (1906-1988) was a painter and writer whose works contributed greatly to the British Surrealist movement before and after the Second World War. Colquhoun's phantasmagoric landscapes, her psychically complex and penetrating portraits, hang on the walls of major galleries across the country. The daughter of a civil servant in India, Colquhoun was born in Assam but was soon returned to England. She studied at Cheltenham Art School and the Slade School of Art, after which she took studios around Europe, studying under the likes of Paul Vezelay and Andre Breton. In 1942 she married fellow surrealist Toni del Renzio. An acrimonious divorce in 1947 also saw Colquhoun informally separate from the Surrealist movement, leaving her free to explore her interest in mysticism, the esoteric and the occult. The results of this preoccupation are most evident in her writing, which includes the short novel Goose of Hermogenes (1961) and two earlier travelogues, The Crying of the Wind (1955) and The Living Stones (1957). She died in Lamorna, Cornwall.

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