On graduating from the Slade School in 1931, Colquhoun spent some time travelling and studying abroad. A significant proportion of the 91 works that she exhibited at her first one-person show in Cheltenham in 1936 consists of drawings and watercolours of places that she had visited in the course of her travels through the Mediterranean. Her journeys included Greece, Tenerife and Corsica.
The topographical watercolours include a group of domestic, interior scenes. Devoid of people, they are about transition. Images of a bed, still unmade, from which the occupant has recently departed (Bed I – Athens, 1933), of discarded clothes (Clothes on a Chair, 1931; Clothes in a Heap – Greece 1933) or of a quilt being aired (Quilt Drying – Greece, 1933) record a passing moment in time.
Similarly, when she painted buildings she concentrated on those architectural features that enable movement and transition, especially entrances and doorways (Doorway, Corsica, 1936; Ground Floor Façade, Tenerife, 1936; Gateway, Corsica, 1936). The symbolic final passage of human bodies (The Grave-Circle at Mycenae, 1933) is also recorded. It is relevant that Colquhoun’s best known portrait, Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne (1935), depicts the archaeologist standing in a doorway.
In these works Colquhoun gives early indication of her interest in changes in physical (and, later, in psychological and spiritual) states and locations.
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