In 1976 Colquhoun wrote that “From the middle 1960’s I have used enamel paint, more or less diluted, in a semi automatic way to bring about the emergence of what Breton called the ‘Convulsive Landscape’.” (1) She was not the first to use enamel in this manner. In 1938 Gordon Onslow Ford had begun experimenting with automatic techniques, including one which he termed coulage in which enamel paints were poured onto the canvas and allowed to spread freely. Colquhoun had visited Ford and Matta at Chemillieu in 1939 and may have remembered these experiments.
Some of the works in enamel, especially the early ones, are comparatively large. Volcanic Landscape (1969), Haunted Hedge (1970), and Night Storm at Sea (1970) are each over three feet in their longer dimension. Most, however, are small. In the most sustained period of creative activity since her 1939 exhibition, Colquhoun produced over 100 works in enamel paint between 1976 and 1979. The vast majority of them have never been exhibited. Mostly executed on paper, they are generally no larger than 23 x 32.5cm. (9 x 12½in.). With the paper horizontal, the artist has poured paint onto the surface, tilting and stirring, the gesture becoming the image. Sometimes the paint has been diluted, giving a shallow, semi-matt appearance, like a liquid stain. At other times the undiluted paint has a lacquer-like hardness and reflective brilliance, possessing great depth and mystery.
The works reveal her typical preoccupations. There is, for example, the familiar marine imagery (e.g. Pools Undersea, 1977; Seashore at Night, 1977; Sunlight on Rockpool, 1978 and Sea Depths, 1977). There is imagery that derives from alchemical change and transformation (e.g. In the Alembic, 1978, Primal Fire, 1978, Earth Bubbles, 1979 and Eruption, 1979). And there is also the artist herself as an observer of the beauties of nature. Not, in these instances, of individual plant and flower specimens, but in the wider landscape and the seasons (e.g. Sunrise through Bushes, 1976; Misty Sunrise, 1978; Moonlight through Mist, 1978 and Icy Sunrise, 1979). In these works she shows aspects of nature on local, global and cosmic scales. The images seem to originate from deep within the artist, but also in deep waters, deep space and remote time. They constitute a cosmology, images of great lyrical energy, power and delicacy, distilled from the artists’ private world. Like Miro’s Constellations, they mix the cosmic with the earthly and the personal with the universal. Despite their small size, they appear to be boundless, the image capable of expanding infinitely in all directions. One can imagine her pouring, tilting and stirring the fast-drying paint with broad movements of arm and body. As she worked, we can almost hear the artist humming along to the music of the spheres.
The apogee of this cosmic vision came with the design of a set of Taro (Colquhoun’s preferred spelling) cards in 1977. This is not a Tarot pack in the traditional sense of playable cards. It is very different to the well known Waite pack that consists of cards with their traditional attributions, such as the Fool, the Wheel of Fortune and the Hanged Man. Nor it is a pack such as the Marseilles pack designed by the surrealists in 1940 which had symbols of liberty replacing the traditional images. Instead, these are individual paintings that are abstract in form, automatic in technique and use the colour symbolism derived from Golden Dawn teachings. Intended as meditation glyphs, the cards represent the finest synthesis of her art and magic.
Throughout her life, from the early flower paintings of the 1930s to the late constructions and enamels, Colquhoun displayed a pantheistic world view in which the divine, the human and the natural are all fused together. It is a view in which creation and destruction are parts of the same process which flows through all life and all matter. It signifies the unity of nature that underlies its surface diversity.
Notes
1. Exhibition catalogue: Penzance, Newlyn-Orion Galleries, 27th February - 23rd March 1976. Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism, Paintings, Drawings, Collages 1936-76. The quotation is from the artist’s introductory essay. Where in Breton’s writings does the phrase ‘convulsive landscape’ occur? I have been unable to trace it. The phrase ‘convulsive beauty’ is well known, originally occurring in the final sentence of Nadja.
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