Matsumoto Toshio > MONA LISA 1973

Elisabeth Collins...

Woman by the Sea circa 1945

The Man in Half-Armour circa 1945

A Woman Reading in a Pond circa 1945

Elisabeth Collins once explained her somewhat episodic painting career by asserting that ‘living and people come first’. Her marriage to a fellow artist, Cecil Collins, entailed her loving gift to him of much of her time and energy for the 58 years they were together: he acknowledged her as the inspiration of his life and work, the Lady and the Angel in his paintings.

She overcame some family opposition to become a sculpture student at Leeds School of Art before going on to continue her sculpture studies in London. She met Cecil Collins soon after starting at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, and they were married as students in 1931. They moved to the country, first to a simple cottage in Buckinghamshire where Elisabeth fetched their water from a well and Eric Gill was one of their neighbours. Years later she recalled: ‘We only had £5 a week, which was my allowance from my parents. It was enough if you lived in obscurity, and we preferred it that way… Living the way we did had real quality.’

The Collins’ met the American artist Mark Tobey in 1936, and were invited by him to come and live near the idealistic community founded by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst at Dartington. Dartington, like the Cornish School in Seattle, aimed to provide an opportunity for a co-ordinated study of all the arts – music, dance, theatre, drawing and painting. Elisabeth and Cecil made many friends and gradually became more involved with the community. At the outbreak of the War they moved to Dartington itself, where Cecil became director of the Art Studio Workshop after the internment of the German artist and designer Hein Heckroth.

This was a significant and productive period of their lives. For Elisabeth, the communal pooling of domestic chores like cooking and washing released time for her to paint, encouraged by Tobey and his innovative drawing classes. Tobey believed that by making an effort to express their ideas on paper, his students were ‘freeing’ themselves, ‘opening up great powers for living the life of the artist within us all’. Elisabeth responded with an outpouring of magical gouaches and drawings – naïve, yet sophisticated and strangely charming. Her pictures depicted a colourful, dreamlike world, once described as being from ‘the Eastern European fairy-tale province of her imagination’. It was an image in one of Elisabeth’s early drawings, The First Fool, that inspired Cecil Collins’ great series of works on the theme of the Fool – to him a symbol of ‘purity of consciousness’.

In 1943 the Collins’ left Dartington, and moved to Cambridge, where Elisabeth occasionally exhibited some of her gouache paintings under the name ‘Belmont’ as a way of keeping her work independent of Cecil’s growing reputation. His 1944 London exhibition at the LeFevre Gallery had received great acclaim, and his seminal essay The Vision of the Fool, was published in 1947.

In 1951 Cecil Collins was offered a teaching post at the Central School of Art in London, and for many years travelled from Cambridge several days a week. Later he and Elisabeth moved to London, where they shared a house in Chelsea with the writer and poet Kathleen Raine – Elisabeth and Cecil lived in their own top floors of the house for the rest of their lives. Their home became a focus for a wide circle – composers, writers, poets, artists, and Cecil’s students and admirers. Cecil painted in the studio room below, while Elisabeth worked on their dining table, making small drawings and gouaches on scraps and fragments of paper she had saved; and writing letters in her distinctive idiosyncratic handwriting (always in red ink).

After Cecil’s death in 1989, Elisabeth began to use a corner of his studio, keeping her numerous small works in progress hidden under a piece of cloth. Often she would find an early drawing or watercolour and start to work on it again many years later, saying that she now knew what was wrong with it. She would often put a work which she was still thinking about into a frame and hang it on the stairs for a time, ‘to wait and let colours settle… often all sorts of things emerge.’

The years on her own became a period when Elisabeth produced a substantial amount of her small-scale gouache paintings: colourful, poetic fantasies, imbued with a quirky wit. Even in her eighties and nineties, when she had developed a slight tremor, and drew and wrote with an almost quavering ink line, this became part of their charm. She was still able to make a face come alive and express a variety of emotions with a few incisive ink lines over the layers of watercolour and gouache. She said that ‘in each face, you strike what is the chief message or feeling, as you do when you’re talking to people. It’s important to keep clear the channels of understanding.’ She sometimes talked of ‘the kind of painting I feel sympathy for – the wonderful luminous quality of Redon’, and there are some affinities in her work with the Russian folkloric art of Chagall, Larianov and early Kandinsky.

In 1989 Elisabeth had an exhibition at the Albermarle Gallery to coincide with Cecil’s Retrospective at the Tate – a double celebration of their life and work. In 1996 her exhibition at England & Co led to the acquisition of four works by the Tate Gallery, which gave her great pleasure, although she was characteristically modest about it. A memorial exhibition, Elisabeth Collins 1904-2000: Works from the Studio, was held at England & Co in 2002.

Jane England

The Fool circa 1930

Cecil Collins circa 1930

Fool Thinking in a Landscape c1938

Magical Etching c1939

Ithell Colquhoun...magick works..

Ithell Colquhoun

"Scylla" 1938

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) is best known today for being a painter and author of great prominence on the British surrealist scene. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London and soon also studied the arts in France, and there met the master Salvador Dalí which made a great impact on her artistic expression. She made her debut at a exhibition in 1936 and by then already had developed her style which she herself described as "magic realism", showing strong influences of Dalí.

From 1939 and onwards Ithell often used a technique which can best be described as "automatic painting", i.e. the artistic equivalent of automatic writing, not uncommon amongst surrealist painters such as her mentor Salvador Dalí. It was also used amongst certain symbolist painters and writers, such as the Golden Dawn Adept William Butler Yeats. This is also a technique which naturally can be found in some occult circles, which leads us to Ithell's connections with the occult community, in which she was known as Soror Splendidior Vitro (see monogram at far right for this magical motto). Ithell in fact took part in the movement today commonly known as the Golden Dawn. There she used her artistic abilities in full bloom to express its occult worldview, especially connected to the Qabalistic glyph of the Tree of Life.

In the Golden Dawn community Ithell is best known to us for her seminal work and personal interpretation of the history of the Golden Dawn, called The Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn. This book, which basically is a biography on S.L. MacGregor Mathers, was published by Spearman in 1975 and is currently out of print. Compared to the more academically rigid and hence dispassionate works of authors like Ellic Howe and R.A. Gilbert, the work of Ithell Colquhoun is written with love and passion for the tradition and from the perspective of an initiate. This makes the work the more interesting as it draws from many sources not strictly speaking legitimate from the academic angle, such as word of mouth traditions and gossip amongst initiates, etc.

Ithell also wrote one more occult work, the hermetic-surrealist novel Goose of Hermogenes, published by Peter Owen in 1961. This work was probably developed under the influence of automatic writing, or so Steve Nichols asserts us, and can be best regarded as a modern oracle. In short Ithell's heroine finds out, while visiting her uncle at his island that exists out of time and space, that he actually is in search of the philosopher’s stone. Goose of Hermogenes can best be described as an esoteric fantasy novel which draws from scenes and imagery mostly derived from medieval occult sources. Each chapter title is also correlated to different stages in the alchemical work. It is a reading worth while for any student of the Golden Dawn or of Hermeticism.SR

her magical works..

more to follow...

moon dreams

ex-libris...

Sen noci svatojanske. Midsummer night dream...by Jiri Trnka

Cupid is a knavish lad,
Thus to make poor females mad

Puck's comment on the bedraggled Hermia, as she gives up the pursuit of Helena and Lysander.

Thought-forms...

Nonphysical entities which exist in either the mental or astral plane. Each entity is created from the thought. Every thought is said to generate vibrations in the aura's mental body, which assume a floating form and colors depending on the nature and intensity of the thought. These thought-forms are usually seen by clairvoyants; and may be intuitively sensed by others.

Theosophists and clairvoyants Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater placed thought-forms in three classifications: (1) the image of the thinker (see Bilocation); (2) an image of a material object associated with the thought; and (3) an independent image expressing the inherent qualities of the thought. Thoughts which are of a low nature, such as anger, hate, lust, greed, and so on, create thought-forms which are dense in color and form. Thought of a more spiritual nature tend to generate forms possessing a greater purity, clarity, and refinement.

Thought-forms can be directed toward anyone, but to be effective they must latch onto a similar vibration in the other person’s aura. If they are unable to do so, they can boomerang back on the sender. Thus, working according to the occult theory, one who directs evil toward another runs the risk of having it return.

The strength and clarity of the original thought determines the duration, strength and the distance of travel of its developed thought-form. It is said that thought-forms can have the capability to assume their own energy and appear to be intelligent and independent. Equally strong thought-forms can disperse them, or they may disintegrate when their purpose has been accomplished. Some may stay in existence for years, while others can become uncontrollable and turn on their senders.

Thought-forms, in magic, are also called "artificial elements," which are created through ritual involving intense concentration, repetition, and visualization. (see Egrigor) They can be directed toward individuals to protect or heal, or to harm. Also, thought-forms can be created to perform low-level tasks and errands.

Other thought-forms can occur spontaneously, for example, "Group minds" that emerge whenever a group of people concentrate on the same thought, ideas, or goals, such as a team of employees or a crowd of demonstrators. To a certain extent the group-mind possesses the group, such is seen in psychic bonding and power that coalesces in crowds, and in the synergy of a close-knit working group. Usually when the group disbands the power of the group-mind dissipates too. A.G.H.

An excerpt from

THOUGHT-FORMS

BY ANNIE BESANT
AND C.W. LEADBEATER

The text of this little book is the joint work of Mr Leadbeater and myself; some of it has already appeared as an article in Lucifer (now the Theosophical Review), but the greater part of it is new. The drawing and painting of the Thought-Forms observed by Mr Leadbeater or by myself, or by both of us together, has been done by three friends—Mr John Varley, Mr Prince, and Miss Macfarlane, to each of whom we tender our cordial thanks. To paint in earth's dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds is a hard and thankless task; so much the more gratitude is due to those who have attempted it. They needed coloured fire, and had only ground earths. We have also to thank Mr F. Bligh Bond for allowing us to use his essay on Vibration Figures, and some of his exquisite drawings. Another friend, who sent us some notes and a few drawings, insists on remaining anonymous, so we can only send our thanks to him with similar anonymity.

It is our earnest hope—as it is our belief—that this little book will serve as a striking moral lesson to every reader, making him realise the nature and power of his thoughts, acting as a stimulus to the noble, a curb on the base. With this belief and hope we send it on its way.
ANNIE BESANT.

illustrations of thought forms


FIG. 11. RADIATING AFFECTION


FIG. 39. IN THE SIX DIRECTIONS


FIG. 12. PEACE AND PROTECTION


FIG. 15. UPWARD RUSH OF DEVOTION


FIG. 16. SELF-RENUNCIATION


FIG. 37. SYMPATHY AND LOVE FOR ALL


FIG. 38. AN ASPIRATION TO ENFOLD ALL

Thought Forms

María Sabina: Mujer Espíritu

Ah, Jesu Kri
I am a woman who shouts
I am a woman who whistles
I am a woman who lightnings, says
...
Woman who resounds
Woman torn up out of the ground
Woman who resounds
Woman torn up out of the ground
Woman of the principal berries, says
Woman of the sacred berries, says
...
Book woman
Book woman
Morning Star woman
Cross Star woman
God Star woman
...
Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum

I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says

Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin...


My space for Maria Sabina >>
www.myspace.com/mariasabinaamor

After Hans...

Annie le Brun...Twelfth Ring

Text- Annie le Brun

Illustration- Toyen