The natural surrealism of the St Ives seaside, barnacles and limpets clinging to suggestively shaped rocks, is the perfect context for the surrealist art of Ithell Colquhoun. While sea shells, corals and translucent green water are far from her only subjects, she did paint them with a ravishing, hypnotising sensuality.
In her 1938 painting Scylla, two rocky pinnacles rise from a translucent green-blue sea – except these geological formations are not stone, they are flesh. Knobbly pink sausages intertwine to form towering pillars. Their summits are rounded like the ends of two erect penises – that’s the artistic intention, not my dirty daydreaming. Colquhoun, as she said, is in the bath beholding her own thighs. Between them sprouts a red coral for pubic hair. A sharp-prowed boat is heading towards the opening.
