The lowdown

Who was Leonora Carrington?

Leonora Carrington’s art is everywhere on Instagram now. More than a decade after her death, her mythic worlds and wild women still feel essential. Alive.

She was born with the Sun in Aries and the Moon in Libra: a tension between fierce individuality and relational grace. Her Moon opposed Venus in Aries, and Lilith, also in Aries, carved her path in exile and fire.

Some women fit in.
Some smooth their edges, soften their spines and smile through silencing.
And then there are women like Leonora.

She broke the mould, shattered the frame, and painted the pieces into another dimension.

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Refusal

Born to privilege, destined for freedom

Leonora was raised for an ornamental life. She rejected it. Refusal became her art form.

Governesses, nuns and tutors tried to shape her. She was expelled from convent schools for her defiance, and eventually sent to Florence to study art. Back in London, she was expected to be presented at court, a polished debutante ready for the marriage market. Instead, the story goes, she tucked Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza under her arm and refused to play the part.

She wasn’t there to be chosen.
She was there to choose.
To create. To conjure. To resist.

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A gothic portal

Crookhey Hall

From 1920 to 1927, Leonora lived at Crookhey Hall, a Gothic Revival mansion in Lancashire. It wasn’t just a home. It was a psychic gateway: secret staircases, velvet shadows, the echo of ancestors in the walls.

Crookhey taught her that the veil is thin, and that the visible is never the whole story. She painted it again decades later, from memory.

She didn’t just live there. She began there.

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The conjurer

Rejecting the roles assigned to her

In 1937, Leonora met the German surrealist Max Ernst, and their relationship carried her into the mythic, erotic, radical world of Parisian surrealism. But even there, among wild minds, she wasn’t content to be someone’s muse.

Then the war came. Ernst was arrested. Leonora fled to Spain, where a breakdown led to brutal institutionalisation. She was drugged, confined and nearly erased.

She refused to be broken. She wrote Down Below, a raw, visionary account of madness and survival. It wasn’t just a memoir. It was resurrection, resistance in ink.

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Exile

Like Lilith, Leonora chose exile over obedience

Like Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who walked out of the garden rather than submit, Leonora walked away from the society that tried to silence her. She found freedom in Mexico City, and rebuilt herself in colour, symbol and spell.

There, beside her close friends the painter Remedios Varo and the photographer Kati Horna, she created a matriarchal, mystical cosmos, in the same city where Frida Kahlo was painting her own mythology.

She created her own dimension.

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Because we are still asked to shrink.
To be nice. To make sense.
Leonora didn’t, and she thrived.

She didn’t just make art. She made portals. She didn’t just break rules. She built realms. Her legacy is a howl of refusal and a hymn of becoming.

If you’ve ever been called too intense, too strange, too much; if your life feels like a spiral, not a straight line; if you’ve cracked open and made something sacred from the shards, Leonora is your muse.

Meet another visionary who painted her own cosmos: Hilma af Klint.

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