Grace Pailthorpe - British Surrealism

Grace Pailthorpe  1883 –1971) was a British surrealist painter, surgeon, and psychology researcher.Pailthorpe was born in St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex in 1883. She was the third child and the only daughter among the ten children born to Edward Pailthorpe and Lavinia Green, who were both members of the Plymouth Brethren, a strict and puritanical religious sect...Pailthorpe contributed to the International Surrealist Exhibition held in London during 1936 and also contributed to other Surrealist exhibitions and publications, such as the London Bulletin. Her paintings and drawings were greatly praised by, among others, André Breton. In 1938 Pailthorpe published The Scientific Aspect of Surrealism which was not well received by other British Surrealist artists. In this, and later works, she put forward the theory that surrealism and psychoanalysis were both means to personal liberation and the development of artistic creativity and freedom of expression...She and Mednikoff undertook analysis of each other's art to determine the associations behind each image. Regarding this as an alternative to conventional analysis, they would swop the roles of patient and analyst between themselves every fortnight.Although Pailthorpe presented the results of these unorthodox studies in lectures to colleagues, the studies were not published during her lifetime.Wikipedia

Ithell Colquhoun - artist, writer, occultist

Ithell Colquhoun (9 October 1906 – 11 April 1988) was a British Surrealist painter and author. She was born in Shillong, Eastern Bengal and Assam, British India. From the 1930s to her death, her work was exhibited widely in Britain and Germany.Margaret Ithell Colquhoun was born in Shillong, Eastern Bengal and Assam, British India. Her parents were Henry Colquhoun, an assistant to the ambassador in Manipur, and his wife Georgia. Colquhoun was educated in Rodwell, near Weymouth, Dorset before attending Cheltenham Ladies' College. There she studied topics such as the cabbala and the occult.Colquhoun did take some art courses, but she was largely self-taught. Colquhoun studied for a period at the Slade School of Art in London, under Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe, before travelling to France in 1931. It was in Paris that she discovered surrealism and was especially influenced by the works of Salvador Dalí. Another influence on Colquhoun was the psychomorphological works of Roberto Matta and Onslow Ford. Her first one-woman exhibition of works was at Cheltenham Art Gallery in 1936. Soon after, she joined the political group, Artists' International Association. She took part in the 1939 exhibition Living Art in England on an independent basis, but that same year she met Breton in Paris and joined the English surrealist group. By 1939, Colquhoun had joined the English Surrealist Group and in June she and Rowland Penrose showed their works in a joint exhibition at Mayor Gallery. There they created a scandal by asking a vagrant to sit in the window.

 Colquhoun's early works included a series of enlarged images of flora, occupying the full canvas and painted almost photographically. By the late 1930s, she had painted two significant pieces; Scylla in 1938, whose joined rocks in the water creates the impression of a "feminine opening" whilst also showing phallic imagery, and Rivières tièdes which shows liquids flowing from a Mediterranean church.
In the 1940s, Colquhoun's works were experiments to explore consciousness and the subconscious. She did this by using recognised methods such as decalcomania, fumage, frottage and collage. Colquhoun went further, developing new techniques such as superautomatism, stillomanay, parsemage, and entoptic graphomania writing about them in her article The mantic stain.
Three works which stand out during the 1940s are The Pine Family, which deals with dismemberment and castration, A Visitation which shows a flat heart shape with multicoloured beams of light and Dreaming Leaps, a homage to Sonia Araquistain.Colquhoun did not define herself as a Surrealist artist, as she only too part in a single Surrealist exhibit. Instead she considered herself "independent"Wikipedia