The Crying of the Wind

With an introduction by Stewart Lee.'How I envy you if you are about to read either, or both, of Ithell Colquhoun's gnostic travelogues for the first time, for soon you, too, will be post-Colquhoun, and everything will seem ever so slightly altered.' –Stewart LeeIthell Colquhoun was a leading British surrealist painter and writer in the post war years. In

The Crying of the Wind she recalls episodes from her travels in Ireland as a young woman, who, in a bid to escape the modern world, sets out across the unruly Irish countryside. Here among the holy wells, monasteries and tumuli, she finds a canvass on which her sensibility and animist beliefs freely express themselves. Her style is beguiling, her voice sincere and through it we discover her Ireland, alive and compelling, a place where the wind cries, the stones tell old tales and the mountains watch over the roads and travellers. By intuiting the eerie magic of Ireland, Colquhoun casts her own spell; she offers up a land of myth and legend, stripped of its modern signs, and she offers up herself, a portrait of an artist as a young woman.