A surrealist who never liked the label. A painter, poet, occultist, and unrepentant visionary. Ithell Colquhoun forged her own creative path – fearlessly experimental, spiritually attuned, and deeply bound to the Cornish landscape she made her home.
In the 1930s and 40s, she was a rising force in British Surrealism. But her commitment to mysticism, ritual, and spiritual autonomy meant she often stood apart. Long before Cornwall became a creative sanctuary for many, Colquhoun had already claimed its wild western edge – settling first in Lamorna Cove, then in the hamlet of Paul – where ancient sites, druidic myth, and elemental terrain mirrored her inner world.
Her early years were marked by travel, study and the influence of surrealist heavyweights like André Breton and Salvador Dalí. But even as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, Colquhoun was already carving out her own path – investigating gender, sexuality and consciousness, long before it was socially permissible to do so.
Her creative practice wasn’t confined to painting. It was a full-bodied exploration of the subconscious: automatism, stillomancy (folded ink-blot symmetry), and fumage (drawing with smoke) became ways to bypass the rational mind. What emerged was haunting, sensual, sometimes otherworldly.
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
