Full Description
'Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history' - Art UK
'Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you' - Stewart Lee
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.
Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.
With a new introduction by Edward Parnell, the PEN Ackerley shortlisted author of Ghostland and The Listeners
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.
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
List of Photographs and Illustrations
Foreword by Edward Parnell
Ancient Scent
Vow Cave
Procession of the Year
Birds of the Valley
Lamorna Shades
Living Stones
In Search of the Saints
The Woodcutters
Assembly of the Bards
Bride of Quietness
Dance to the Sun
The Fair at Helston
The 'Obba 'Oss
Harlyn Past and Present
Hound-Voice
Peripheral
Foodlore
Germoe's Wells
Traces of King Arthur
The Troy-Stones
Crowley in Cornwall
Searcher-Out of Witchcraft
Hills of Michael
Last and First
