John Halkes on Ithell Colquhoun, Janet Gibbs, Mousehole and UFOs

John Halkes was director and curator of Newlyn Art Gallery between 1974 and 1990. Interview Rupert White.

Richard Shillitoe, who is an expert on Ithell, contacted me to say he remembers buying her oil painting 'Alcove II' from you at the Newlyn Orion. He said this was in 1974.

Ithell was our neighbour in Mousehole. She was very interesting, but she was pretty frail. And very lonely. Typical of the children of the Raj.

She had a loneliness about her?

She couldn’t keep relationships…

Because she was so demanding?

She was demanding.

As an artist she followed every whim. I sat with her and said ‘you’re doing these works on cardboard and found objects, have you heard of Kurt Schwitters?’ ‘Oh yes. You see, in Surrealism it’s all open, it's all possible’. She showed me all her techniques, then she started showing me stuff from the 30s and 40s which were exquisite. I'm sure Scylla, for example, was amongst them.

I took the Arts Council up to Stone Cross Cottage, but nobody knew where to place her. She was a surrealist but what she was showing with the Newlyn Society was collage. I think out of deference to the fact that in 1936 she’d had an exhibition with Picasso in London they would go with it. But she was very diffuse in her interests. And all the time she was weirdly fascinated by the occult...

She was a very good writer, and in your introduction to her big 1976 Newlyn Gallery exhibition (catalogue left) you mention her intellect.

She was bright. She was well read. She and I were polar opposites in many ways, in terms of our philosophy or theology, and yet I respected her views. On one wonderful occasion I remember she mentioned Pan… I said ‘we’ve got Pantheism and Panentheism in theology. She said ‘what’s that?’ ‘Pantheism is worshipping the god of nature and Panentheism is seeing everything in nature as god’. She said ‘that’s very interesting isn't it?’

And Ella, my wife, said lightheartedly ‘I see Pan quite often’. Ithell was really, really fascinated, but there was a naivete there.

When she was ill she’d phone up and I’d go and refill the coke stove that was slowly killing her because she was asthmatic. It was an old ceramic-faced thing that burnt anthracite. She’d be propped up in bed and I’d feed the cats. And If she was away I’d go up and feed the cats.

She told me about her past and Toni Del Renzio and going to the Scillies.

Do you know where she stayed on the Scillies?

It was wartime. The surrealists were pretty paranoid because there’d been a left-wing manifesto. A lot in the international movement were Marxist. She told me the reason she left them, to her detriment, was because she felt she had been sidelined because she didn’t want art to be politicised. But she inherited that paranoia. She and del Renzio decamped to the Scillies in much the same way that Barbara and Ben came to Carbis Bay to escape the war.

John Wells was the GP in the Scillies then. He was known as the medical officer. The islands had a chaplain and a medical officer - like a ship!

I read recently that when Ithell went to the Gorseth in Brittany she was made a deaconess of the Celtic Church there. Did she speak about that?

She would have seen the Celtic church as being essentially a Christian adoption of the natural patterns, the flow of the seasons, nature… She mopped up this that and the other… Some of it from Frazer's 'The Golden Bough'. The occult really fascinated her as did Celtic spirituality.

So did you have conversations about that?

Not really. I’d just listen to her. If you looked through her racks of paintings there were exquisite watercolours and drawings of flowers and plants. They weren’t just botanical they were ‘gut’ paintings. I thought they were fabulous.

Michael Parkin, the dealer in London, came down and met me, and said ‘I want to meet people - can you introduce me to Ithell Colquhoun?’. I said ‘Yes of course’. I took him to Ithell. She made tea, and he was naturally very charming and a fantastically good gossip. And she knew the gossip! They gossiped away. I was absolutely spellbound.

Then he bought things and he put on an exhibition of her works.

Yes in 1977. I have the catalogue. So Ithell’s big Newlyn show in 1976 was the whole gallery?

The whole upstairs.

And the downstairs gallery then was much smaller – about half the size?

We called it ‘the well’. John Miller had designed the interior with a balcony round to the lower gallery. The lower gallery was just under half the size of the upper gallery.

I have the list of works here. 'Scylla' is the first painting listed. 'Scylla' (right) was probably the first work the Tate acquired. It's still the best known.

She was interested in sexuality and feminism, and deviancy to some extent. She was gullible but also fascinated by the world, by the world of ideas. So she was enormous fun to be with, but she was tricky.

I thought I had a good relationship with her. But I had a painting which I took up to the Government art collection in Southwark. I took this charming little painting of Ithell’s up with some other things, I think a Roger Hilton and one or two other bits and bobs.

They bought this oil on tablet. I said to her ‘what’s the ground?’ She said ‘um I think its ceramic’. It weighed heavy, but it was gessoed around and framed up so you could n’t tell. I took it up to London. Away from her damp studio environment in the air-conditioned Southwark House collection it dried out and cracked! It was obviously teak or something. They reneged on the sale and it had to come back. She was a bit miffed. It took ages to get it back.

During that period in the late 70's I was put on the board of Friends of the Earth and in '79 was made chair so I'd be up and down regularly. I'd do the Arts Council and FotE meetings. But I could never get to Southwark to get the painting. The months ticked by she said ‘is it coming back?’ I said ‘its quite safe…' Then another month or so ticked by and I got a solicitors letter!

I think this correspondence is in the Tate archive.

I said to the solicitor ‘What are you doing? This is just her being impatient’. He said ‘after what you've done for her it seems a bit odd’. I said ‘she doesn’t do relationships. She can’t sustain them she’s always suspicious. She’s carved a life out as a woman artist. Its been a tough life’.

She was thrown overseas as a baby and didn’t know her parents. And the surrealist movement was hardly a comfortable homestead. I said ‘I can understand’. But really you can’t behave like that.

Looking at the image in the 1976 Newlyn catalogue, she wore these smock-like dresses. Do you think she made them herself?

Yes, they were curtains! That plumbago plant was in her studio-conservatory, which was attached to the main house. So the photo may have been taken in the conservatory. The garden was very verdant and she had lots of sheds. She had a summer house with views down to the sea - a view that was diminishing as the plants grew up! And there was stuff in there.

Her paintings...

Yes, and works on paper. Fortunately she had a shed which was her main store which was dark and better protected. I can’t remember where on earth she actually painted. I had the impression she did so in the cottage in part of the conservatory.

Good light there presumably. Do you remember much about the interior? She writes about that big brown portrait of MacGregor Mathers (below right)...

Yes. It dominated the inter-connected sitting area. You came through the kitchen from the entrance and he was there on the wall of the linking room. She had a wooden framed conservatory, with a big plumbago plant with ice blue flowers that matched her eyes (portrait below, left).

There was a fireplace inside, and Mathers was there above the fireplace.

Was the house sort of open plan?

Inside was open plan, yes.

Sheila Hicks was her best friend. She had a flat in the hotel in Penzance. The family bought the Queen’s hotel. Sheila did a bit of painting herself. She was a gentle soul and she befriended Ithell and formed a sort of Ithell appreciation society.

What year did Ithell die?

1988. She died in Menwinnion Nursing Home near the Merry Maidens and Vow Cave. Did she ever go back to Vow Cave Studio?

I don’t think so.

But she rented it out?

Possibly. I had a good friend who lived nearby: Janet Gibbs who lived at Chy an Goverrow. Janet was an early member of Friends of the Earth.

Janet was mentioned in The Living Stones. And Biddy Picard would have left her caravan on Janet’s land...

Janet was quite alternative. The earliest member of the Soil Association. I arrived living in Mousehole and we called a meeting for Friends of the Earth in 1972 and met Janet who immediately said ‘come and see me in Lamorna’.

I became her executor. My wife Ella saved her life once. She was talking on the phone. Janet was chatting to Ella and her speech got more and more slurred. I got from Tredavoe to Lamorna in about ten minutes and I found her on the floor. Jackdaws had nested in her chimney and she had had carbon monoxide poisoning. Once the door was opened she started to come round…

Was there anything remarkable about the interior décor at Ithell's bungalow. Was it painted bright orange or anything? Or perhaps it was just functional.

Yes. It was a home for her and her cats.

Do you remember how many cats?

Two or three.

She liked cats…

There again that says a lot. They’re independent!

You’re implying that she was quite self-contained, and she didn’t want other people intruding into her thoughts…

She was certainly a damaged personality because of her childhood. I could see it because of the way she talked about not seeing her parents. When I asked her about Eileen Agar and Max Ernst and the London Galleries, she said ‘I was pretty young, and women didn’t get a look in. If you toe the line like Eileen (Agar) you’d be OK, but when the manifesto came out I was off’.

You mention Sheila Hicks. Sheila would have helped provide transport…

Sheila was always immensely kind with food and transport.

So if she needed to get to the gallery she could have asked Sheila to give her a lift.

She wouldn’t have relied on buses. She always seemed to survive. I left Mousehole in 76 and moved to Tredavoe. So after that I couldn’t go up so easily to feed the cats and so on.

Sheila retired with Roy to the Queen’s Hotel, where she had a flat, and she took over looking after Ithell. Ithell became a sort of hobby. Sheila was an immensely kind mother-figure.

And she'd have had transport. Sounds like she'd have been able to ask people to give her lifts into Penzance. And you think Sheila would have got other people to help Ithell towards the end…

Yes, definitely.

Did Ithell have a posh way of speaking?

She had a very tinkly middle-class voice.

She went to a posh school in Cheltenham. Did she have the refined manners you might expect of someone of her generation?

Her tea cups were bone china, but she was pretty hippy. I mean she’d lived in a cabin in Lamorna. She had traces of gentility but she was definitely a hippy. She was quietly spoken. She could be very amusing. But she had bad asthma so after laughing, she’d sigh and take deep breaths.

Were you involved at all when Ithell died?

No. Was there a ceremony of any sort?

She was cremated and her ashes were thrown into the sea. When she died part of her estate went to the Tate and part of it went to the NT. Quite a lot was in storage with the NT...

They didn’t know what to do with it.

In ‘82, ‘83 I popped back to see her. I took the vicar of Paul round to meet her at Stone Cross Cottage. That was very amusing. Geoffrey Harper. He was a lovely man. He just said ‘She’s really strange is nt she? I don’t know about this occult stuff!’

Ithell was very interested in flying saucers. She phoned me up one night and said ‘I can see a flying saucer here out of the window. Its stationary, then it moves, and then it stops. It’s got this sort of lenticular light coming from it’. I said ‘it’s probably an anti-submarine helicopter doing exercises in Mount's Bay’. ‘Oh’ she said ‘I thought it was a flying saucer. I’m always on the lookout for them’. It had to be otherworldly. If there was something she was seeking all her life it was this otherworldliness.

She showed her Taro paintings at the Newlyn in 1977. ‘The Taro as Colour’ 78 cards mounted in five frames. They’re still in the frames now.

That would have been in the side gallery.

Talking of frames, do you remember The Framers Gallery in PZ? Ithell had her last solo show there.

That was the bottom of Morrab Road. It was run by Keith Buttress. He had a place up near Kings Rd., Alverton, then he took over a shop right down at the bottom of Morrab Road opposite the Citroen garage as it was then. All of the local artists flocked to Keith to get work framed.

Was that the left or right going up?

On the right when you turn off the prom, below the lower entrance to Morrab Gardens.

When did the Orion Gallery close?

We formed Newlyn Orion in 74 then in 75 there was 25% inflation, and so the Arts Council said we can’t fund two galleries for another year. So reluctantly we had to close the Orion but we kept the name, against the future in case we wanted reopen a gallery. It then became the Exchange.

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