The Living Stones: Cornwall

(Paperback)

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Description

A classic travelogue by Britain's foremost female surrealist painter, which immerses the reader in a dreamlike Cornwall where landscape and legend meet

Painter Ithell Colquhoun arrives in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So begins a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present.

Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore - and a place where everyday reality speaks to the world beyond.

Reviews

'Prodigious and inventive...all her life' - Guardian

'She thumbed her nose at convention' -

'One of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century' -

'Colquhouns unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history.' - Art UK

'May yet work a magical transformation on your relationship with any landscape around you...Colquhouns time-travelling survey of Cornwalls culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you, doing for the westernmost county what Arthur Machen did for London, what Alan Moore does for Northampton and what Frank Waters did for the American South-West.' -

Author Bio

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as The Living Stones: Cornwall, she is the author of The Crying of the Wind: Ireland and the novel Goose of Hermogenes, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.