ITHELL COLQUHOUN

(1906-1988)

Landscape of nightmare

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist's collection.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above in the late 1970s).

Exhibited
London, Mayor Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings by Ithell Colquhoun, 5 - 29 March 1947, no. 9.
Cambridge, Heffer Gallery, Ithell Colquhoun. Paintings and Drawings 1942-1953, 20 April – 9 May 1953, no. 7.
Colchester, The Minories, A Salute to British Surrealism 1930-1950, 6 April - 5 May 1985, no. 23 (later travelled to London and Hull).

Colquhoun's paintings (and writings) often feature portals that connect the surface of the earth with other regions. Sometimes the portals are naturalistic, taking the form of caves or holy wells, and sometimes, as here, the portal is imaginative. Generally, they are benign, allowing positive earth energies to break the surface but rarely, as in Landscape of nightmare, the portal is menacing: it is difficult to imagine that any of the powers or forces that will use this gateway have a benevolent reason for passing through. According to a statement by the artist quoted in the Evening Standard, 22nd March 1947, the painting was induced by a stay at a haunted inn in Wales.

The painting combines a highly traditional oil painting technique with the surrealist automatism of decalcomania. The contrast between the techniques, the flat colours of the mountains and the ribbed and furrowed central feature is particularly striking.

It is an apparent incongruity that whilst Colquhoun was at the height of her engagement with spontaneous, thought-free and automatic methods of painting, she was also practicing and writing about the traditional and time-consuming methods of painting in oils. Thus, in 1949 she published what is still the longest and most detailed account of surrealist automatisms in the English language ('The Mantic Stain', Enquiry, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 15-21). This followed a series of instructional articles on buon fresco and painting on panels. In one of these, ('Preparation of Gesso Panels for Decorative Painting', The Illustrated Carpenter and Builder, September 7, 1945, pp. 986-90), she remarked 'I have frequently sawn up disused cupboards or tables and utilized the resulting panels with success.' Landscape of nightmare, painted on a piece of wood repurposed from an old item of furniture is one such work.

A number of preparatory drawings and the cartoon are in the Tate Archive.

We are grateful to Dr Richard Shillitoe for his assistance in cataloguing the present work.