The Living Stones
Description
<b>'Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history' - <i>Art UK</i></b>
<b>'Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you' - Stewart Lee</b>
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.
<b>Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.</b>
<b>With a new introduction by Edward Parnell, the PEN Ackerley shortlisted author of <i>Ghostland</i> and <i>The Listeners</i></b>
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 <i>The Living Stones: Cornwall</i>, she is the author of <i>The Crying of the Wind: Ireland</i> and the novel <i>Goose of Hermogenes</i>, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.
Reviews / Votes
The perfect gateway drug for readers new to Colquhoun... She was that vanishingly rare thing, someone who was wholly, unaffectedly, unapologetically herself * Washington Post * This extraordinary memoir... mixes psychogeography, ethnography, archaeology, folklore, occultism, gossip and entertaining grumblings about the state of modern life... It is hard not be seduced by her faith in nature, her commitment to spiritual transcendence, her decentring of humanity -- Toby Lichtig * TLS * Prodigious and inventive...all her life * Guardian * A painterly stylist, her surrealist visions shrouded in Celtic mist * TLS * Her responses to the aura of place are keen, and her eye for detail is excitingly sharp * Sunday Times * Her vision is radical but consistent, conjuring up a highly structured, idealistic universe that can be reached by the sensitive and imaginatively adept * The Times * Colquhoun is such a delight... at times [she] is Blakean - not to mention Shakespearean * Guardian * Part psychogeography, part handbook to the county... for [Colquhoun] art and magic were the same thing * New Statesman * Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history. * Art UK * She is sensitive to the ways of wind and water, the flowers and birds and trees * Country Life * May yet work a magical transformation on your relationship with any landscape around you...Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's 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. She thumbed her nose at convention One of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century This year saw the striking rediscovery of Ithell Colquhoun, artist, novelist, alchemist, adept of magic: Pushkin Press has reissued her writings, including the fine travel memoir The Living Stones: Cornwall * TLS Books of the Year 2025 *More details
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Content
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