Ithell Colquhoun: Rebel, Mystic and Artist

Ithell Colquhoun: Rebel, Mystic and Artist

“Drawing is two-dimensional sculpture, painting is two-dimensional coloured sculpture. If I do any sculpture, it is coloured.” – The London Bulletin, 1939

But her embrace of the occult and esoteric didn’t sit easily with the established surrealist groups, which barred members from joining outside societies. Faced with the choice between career recognition or personal truth, Colquhoun walked away – choosing freedom, ritual and an intuitive connection to land over belonging to a male-dominated movement.


That path led her back to Cornwall. In West Penwith, she found her sanctuary. A landscape not just of physical forms but of energies. Granite tors, standing stones, solution basins, sacred wells – to Colquhoun, these were living presences. Portals to other realms. She blurred the boundaries between animal, human and mineral; rocks became bodies, trees became limbs, land became skin. Her universe was unified – vibrating with divine force.

“The life of a region depends ultimately on its geologic substratum… It determines streams and wells, vegetation, animal life, and finally the type of human attracted to live there.”
– Ithell Colquhoun, The Living Stones: Cornwall

Her work pulsed with contradiction: sharp geometry softened by fleshy forms. Psychedelic colour palettes paired with sacred symbology. She was unafraid to merge the sensual with the sacred, the mythical with the modern. Her Neolithic visions of sites like Men-an-Tol and The Merry Maidens were not just interpretations – they were invocations.


At her cottage in Paul, Colquhoun amassed a personal library of over 300 volumes on magic, psychology, mythology, art and philosophy. Her paintings became dreamscapes steeped in those ideas – a bold fusion of feeling, form and spiritual insight. They were radical for the time. They still are.

She may not have fit neatly into art history’s canon but perhaps that was never her aim. Colquhoun belonged to the land more than any movement. Her legacy is one of intuitive rebellion – an artist who surrendered to the unseen forces of her inner and outer worlds and emerged with something wholly her own.

Words by Rebecca de Havas

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