Smithsonian Magazine – British artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun was a pioneer of Surrealist “automatism,” creating images from charcoal shavings or letting her unconscious take charge of a pen. Such methods had a “divinatory power,” she explained, comparing them to “the practices of clairvoyants who use … tea leaves and coffee grounds to set in motion their telepathic faculty.” While she traveled in the same circles as household names like Salvador Dalí, Colquhoun broke with Surrealism in 1940 to focus on the occult, a move that may have contributed to her relative obscurity by the time of her death in 1988. – read more