GOATS TREES, c.1942
Watercolour and ink. 9 x 8¾in (23 x 22.2cm.)
Inscribed verso.
Provenance
WH Lane & Son, Penzance, 6 Dec. 2007, lot 218. £100.
This watercolour can probably be dated to the early 1940s, a period when Colquhoun’s colours were at their strongest and her subject matter the most inventive.
The visual parallels between the curves of the female torso and arms and the growths of a tree trunk with branching limbs are clear. It is, indeed, a visual cliché. On a more symbolic level, the relationship between tree and woman is explored in the work of Ana Mendieta and in the following poem, published in the surrealistically inclined publication, Fulcrum (1944) which Colquhoun almost certainly knew:
If you said you loved me
I would rush to a dead tree
and join my veins
with its rotting wood.
To make it live –
to see blood-red leaves open
to see its fruit of human eyes,
and be one with its push
deeper to the earth;
and through its roots
I would feel
the force of gravity.
If you said you loved me
to a dead tree I would go.
Sadi Cherkeshi
In Colquhoun’s oeuvre it can be linked with Tree Anatomy (1942), but here she concentrates on breast-like excrescences rather than vulval crevices. The branches that grow from the protuberances resemble the legs and hoofs of a goat, a traditional symbol of lechery. As elsewhere in Colquhoun’s work, woman is depicted as a powerful sexual force. The curved tusk-like nipples of the figure in the background suggest that sexual appetites can be wild and dangerous in their consuming, seductive power.