During a stay in Paris, in 1931, Colquhoun first saw paintings by Salvador Dali and other surrealist artists. The impact of surrealism on her imagery was not seen until after 1936: the immediate influence was more technical. She learnt from her study of Dali a meticulous and precise technique. This was displayed initially in her paintings of plants and flowers.
Apart from the occasional juvenilia, the first datable flower paintings appeared in 1932, the year following her graduation. Initially, the medium was watercolour; the first oil paintings of flowers did not appear until 1935. In a burst of sustained creative activity, she produced sufficient work, twenty-five items in all, for her first solo London show, Exotic Plant Decorations, held in 1936. Flowers and plants remained a motif to which she returned throughout her working life. For Colquhoun, flowers were undoubtedly reminders of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth that patterns each year and our lives. They reveal the magic of nature; they symbolise fertility and creativity.
Her selection of plants and flowers reveals a fascination for the elaborate and the exotic and, in particular, a fascination with forms that resemble sexual organs (Double Coconut, 1936). The detailing of the leaves and stems, the close-focus, as though magnified, and the close cropping that takes the forms right to the edge of the canvas, characterise the oils of this period and can be seen is such works as Crane Flowers (1935), Anthurium (1936) and Canna (1936).
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