The Living Stones - Ithell Colquhoun

The Living Stones by Ithell Colquhoun / 240-page paperback / 2025 edition from Pushkin Press / ISBN 9781805330974

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‘Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history’ – Art UK

‘Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you’ – Stewart Lee

Painter Ithell Colquhoun arrives in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So begins a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present.

Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore - and a place where everyday reality speaks to the world beyond.

With a new introduction by Edward Parnell, the PEN Ackerley shortlisted author of Ghostland and The Listeners

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as The Living Stones: Cornwall, she is the author of The Crying of the Wind: Ireland and the novel Goose of Hermogenes, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.