Painting, cooking, alchemy--

detail, "The House Opposite," Leonora Carrington

from Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art.

The relation of cooking and art production, according to Chadwick, is of central concern to the artist:

The prominent place given to the cauldron in Celtic myth and Grail legend had long fascinated Carrington, as had alchemical descriptions of the gentle cooking of substances placed in egg-shaped vessels. She has related alchemical processes to those of both painting and cooking, carefully selecting a metaphor that unites the traditional woman's occupation as nourisher of the species with that of the magical transformation of form and color that takes place in the artist's creative process, nourishing the spirit (pp. 68-69).

Carrington's Sidhe

  

Compilation by DistantMirrors, youtube 2012

I've been reading Susan Aberth's Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art in my little bits of stray time and may have something to say about it later... I started with the alchemy chapter because my The Book of the Red King in part rises out of alchemical lore, and so I was eager to read that portion.

But now I am back to the start and reading about her childhood. Here's a quote from the fascinating, rebellious Carrington that I find interesting. It's a slightly different depiction of the Irish faery race, the Sidhe, than what I am accustomed to from Yeats and other reading.

My love for the soil, nature, the gods was given to me by my mother's mother who was Irish from Westmeath, where there is a myth about men who lived underground inside the mountains, called the 'little people' who belong to the race of the 'Sidhe.' My grandmother used to tell me we were descendants of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political and religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold. The stories my grandmother told me were fixed in my mind and they gave me mental pictures that I would later sketch on paper (p. 12.)