I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world expert in myths, folklore, and occultism in art, Dr. Amy Hale speaking on the great surrealist Ithell Colquhoun!

An Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, Hale’s interests range from contemporary magical practice to the history of art, culture, women and Cornwall.

She has helped crack open this side of art history, and that is why I am so excited to be speaking with her today – and focussing on the artistic polymath, Ithell Colquhoun, who, as well as being the most brilliant painter – creating scapes of dreamlike worlds, with organic, bodily-like shapes – was a novelist, poet, essayist, and more. Her output was always concerned spiritual transcendence.

Born in 1906 in India, before studying at the Slade, Colquhoun became involved with the Surrealists in the 1930s – making dazzling paintings of sea monsters – and it was at this moment that her interest in the occult soared. In the 1940s, she relocated from London to Cornwall, and invented a way of working that connected her to the earth, and ancient times.

Colquhoun, according to Hale, had a “magical mind that never stopped” – and Hale has dedicated her career to writing her noted biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor) and, more recently, the collection Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, and is editing a selection of her esoteric essays. So I couldn’t be more delighted to find out more!

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LINKS:

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ithell-colquhoun-931

Amy's books:

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/ithell-colquhoun-genius-of-the-fern-loved-gulley-amy-hale

https://shop.tate.org.uk/sex-magic-ithell-colquhouns-diagrams-of-love/28593.html

Ithell's paintings:

https://artuk.org/discover/artists/colquhoun-ithell-19061988

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/

https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

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Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel

Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic

Music by Ben Wetherfield