Paulina Peavy
Paulina Peavy was an American artist, inventor, designer, sculptor, poet, writer, and lecturer. Best known for her paintings, her work incorporates both mythical and spiritual iconography. In 1932 she attended a seance held in the home of Rev. Ida L. Ewing, the pastor of The National Federation of Spiritual Science, Church No. 68, in Santa Ana, California. Peavy first encountered "Lacamo", a spirit from another world whom she called her "spirit muse," while in a trance during one of the weekly meetings. Afterward when she painted, she claimed that Lacamo directed her brush. She sometimes wore a mask to channel Lacamo’s energy. Her paintings were exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York during her life time and have recently resurfaced in exhibitions. The works reflect her belief that humanity was slowly moving toward an androgynous species, which she called “one-gender perfection,” through contact with alien species, or UFOs. In her consideration of a future-sex and post-masculine world, Peavy’s work aligns with that of Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, and Forest Bess.
Early life
Paulina Peavy was born Pauline Ellen White in Old Colorado City, Colorado on August 24, 1901. In 1906, Peavy's family moved to Portland, Oregon, where she attended both elementary school and high school. When Peavy was six, her mother died, leaving her to live with her father. In her unpublished manuscript The Story of My Life with a “UFO,” Peavy recalls that “it was my father’s belief that education would be wasted on girls ----- as they only shall marry and bear children.” Instead of a traditional high school, Peavy attended the Girl’s Polytechnic School in Portland, Oregon, where courses focused heavily on cooking and sewing.In 1923, Peavy graduated from Oregon State College, with a Bachelor of Science in Vocational Education. She likely met her future husband, Bradley A. Peavey, as a student. They married in 1922. The Peavy family was powerful in Corvallis, Oregon — Bradley’s father, George Wilcox Peavy, was the Dean of Forestry at the time. While Paulina Peavy lived there, he would become the president of the college, and later the mayor of Corvallis. The couple left Oregon, however, and moved to southern California, where Peavy gave birth to her first son, Bradley Adelbert Peavy, in 1924 in San Pedro, California. She gave birth to her second, Wesley Peavy, two years later in 1926. As a young woman, Paulina found herself married to an alcoholic man prone to violence. While Paulina was in a sanitarium for tuberculosis around 1930, her husband Bradley took both boys to his parents’ house in Oregon. When Paulina recovered, she retrieved the boys from Oregon and eventually won custody later that year.
Independent for the first time in her life, Paulina Peavy and her two sons settled in Long Beach, California. By teaching art in local schools, she supported the family. For a period of time in 1932, she left the boys in an orphanage called The Boys and Girls Aid Society in Pasadena, California. According to a later interview in a New York newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle, she taught architectural design in the art department of a junior high school in Long Beach for 14 years. At some point in the 1930s, while teaching for the Los Angeles Board of Education, Peavy took courses at the Chouinard School of Fine Art in Los Angeles on an Art Advanced scholarship. Although an undated resume she later wrote says she finished her MA, school records do not substantiate that claim. After living in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1923 to 1942, she moved to New York, New York, where she remained until the age of 97.
Spiritual and philosophical ideas
In 1932, Peavy began attending weekly séances at the Long Beach home of Ida Ewing of Long Beach, whom she described as "a trance medium." It was there that she said she first met Lacamo, a spirit that Peavy called a UFO, or “Unidentified Foreign Object.” Although Lacamo originally channeled his communications through Ewing, eventually the spirit would "spoke" directly to Peavy. In her 1982 film, Mountain of Myrrh/UFO, she describes her first encounter with the UFO as seeing a "great cloud and fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about itself, the color of amber.... The spirit of the living creations was in the wheels. As for this ring , they were so high they were dreadful. Wherever the living creature went, the wheels went. The flying saucer’s spacecraft form is planetary, consisting of an aggregation of hierarchical egos, a vast pulsating living power unit, promulgated as seed around a central nucleus. Being seed in constant metamorphosis, they create themselves mentally by the brow in any form in any place in the universe and by feat of travel that their thought enacts upon. Their genesis is wholly mental." Lacamo, through Ewing, instructed Peavy to read Isis Unveiled by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian philosopher and co-founder of the Theosophical Society whose ideas inspired the work of other artists like Hilma af Klint. The Bible and Christian Theology figured prominently in Peavy's work throughout her life. A 1946 article by Margaret Mara published in the Brooklyn Eagle reads, “Interpreting the parables in the Bible with a paint brush is the gigantic task undertaken by Paulina Peavy, modernistic painter, who has evolved some amazing theories following 10 years of biblical research.” But her philosophy of the cosmos moved beyond established theosophical and religious tests. She also recalls that Lacamo instructed her to “reduce all capitallised words in the Bible- to their low case and then wholly scientific meanings; as example- biology- embryology- etc.!” Through these synthetic visions, her philosophy and images combined modern conventions of science with historical religious philosophy.Lacamo continued to teach Peavy and co-author works with her for over 50 years. For Peavy, Lacamo existed beyond human conceptions of gender and identity. According to her, Lacamo revealed a vision of the future in which single-sex female reproduction would render men unnecessary. Her worldview hinged on the idea that humans were continually reincarnated until they became “pharaohs,” or “free souls” who had achieved “one-gender perfection." In her art, pyramids represent this evolution. Over time, she developed a philosophy that the world evolved through 12,000 year cycles composed of four seasons of 3,000 years each—the spring age, summer pyramid age, autumn age, and winter age. “The male” only appeared during the winter age, which she also referred to as “Babel.” In her writings, films, and paintings, Peavy advanced her belief that humankind was “nearing the end of our 3,000 year age- likened to a prolonged WINTER” and that soon the spring age, where humanity ascended to “one-gender perfection” would arrive. Curator Bill Arning has drawn a connection between Peavy and radical feminists like Valerie Solanis, who wrote a book called the SCUM Manifesto arguing that men were an unnecessary evil. Her paintings were revealed to her. She felt herself to be the physical maker, but not the spiritual author. Through the act of painting and revising, which she did continually, the images revealed their meaning to her over a long span of time.
Work
As an artist, Peavy worked in painting, drawing, sculpture, writing, poetry, and film. Her work, particularly her mixed-media and Phantasma series, developed a personal symbology consisting of shapes that resembled energy beams, solar systems, and organic shapes that represented ovaries, genitalia, sperm, and fetuses.Paintings, drawings, and mixed-media
Working in thin layers of jewel-toned oil paint, Peavy composed multi-layered images with translucent colors that often referenced her belief in an electric and cosmic relationship between the human brain and higher sources. Her subjects range from her earlier representational works, like the paintings she exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California, to abstract works of geometric and organic shapes symbolizing reincarnation and fertility. Most of her works are undated, but it is presumed that she began working in this style during the 1930s, perhaps while at the Chouinard School of Fine Arts, and continued through the 1970s. In an interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, Peavy describes her technique as "a revolt in art school teachings as well as being the result of research in the bible.” In the same interview, she says, “My paintings attempt to ‘create life’ on canvas, even as my mother created me and as I created my two sons.” Her oil paintings have a hard, almost mirrored surface that resembles enamel as a result of her painting style. During the 1970s and 1980s, she returned to many of her earlier paintings and reworked them in sharper shapes that resembled crystals. Because of this practice a single painting can represent decades of work. In her 1987 film, UFO Identified, Peavy describes her watercolors as depicting creation, or conception: “Light at the moment of conception, the seed nuclear. The tongue of flames ascend and descend of the egg nucleus and then there is light."Between 1975 and 1984, Peavy began working with watercolor, pen, collage, and ink. She often signed both these later works and her earlier ones with her name as well as Lacamo’s. Many of the watercolors are dated. The earliest is dated to 1953. In addition, some have two dates, suggesting that she would return to a work many years later.
Exhibition and critical reception
The complexity of her constructed cosmos and the technical skill with which she executed her images occasionally stymied, but often impressed reviewers and the public. From 1933 to 1942, Peavy exhibited at the San Diego Museum, Civic Center Museum of San Francisco, Stanford University, the Gump Galleries in San Francisco, the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Palos Verdes Gallery in Palos Verdes. In 1935, she stayed with Brigadier General Charles F. Humphrey and his wife. The visit was recorded in the Army and Navy Journal, which described her as “a noted California artist.”In 1939, she was invited to participate in the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California, where she painted a large panel entitled “The Last Supper." Artist Diego Rivera was on site painting a mural at the same time. Peavy’s panel was fourteen by six feet and painted on stretched canvas. The original image was a representational depiction of Jesus Christ at the center, surrounded by other female figures. She brought the painting with her to New York and, as with many of her works, she eventually painted over it and renamed the image "Crystallization of Matter." That painting was destroyed when Peavy moved to Bethesda, Maryland, at the end of her life in 1997. Fortunately, a partial original image survived as a postcard. The later painting, an abstract mosaic of pyramids and other geometric shapes, demonstrates how her work evolved, as she documents in her book The Story of My Life With a "UFO" and in her films from the 1980’s. The reception of her work at the exposition was mixed, but she considered the event a highlight of her life. At the time, a major art critic, Alfred Frankenstein, found some of her work was “quite good,” but that the majority were “curious affairs, glazed hard as mirrors, making much rather monotonous use of concentric circles in drapery, beads, aureoles and curlicues of sorts.” In response, Peavy wrote a letter to the editor entitled “Artist Amazed”:
I wish to thank Mr. Frankenstein for reviewing my exhibitions at the Temple of Religion, but I am amazed that he, with the reputation of being one of the most intelligent art critics of the Bay Area, has followed the examples of unthinking people throughout the ages—that is, to condemn that which they do not understand. Might it have ever occurred to Mr. Frankenstein that the queer gyrations of my paintings, as he has expressed it, might be an expression of the same God-given fundamental principles embodied in the structural and philosophical principles of the ancient Pyramids and even the ancient Egyptians’ art?Three years later, for reasons not entirely known, Peavy moved from Long Beach, California, to New York, New York. The only record she has left of her decision is in her unpublished manuscript, The Story of My Life with a "UFO": "The dictionary defined ‘destiny’- as ‘-that which is to happen to a particular person or thing.’ And so, obviously it was in my destiny to move to New York in 1942." According to an undated resume she composed while in New York, between 1942 and 1943 Peavy exhibited at the Delphic Studios, New York City. In 1943, Peavy had her first solo exhibition in Manhattan at the Argent Gallery. Art Digest'
Mrs. Peavy has technical equipment equal to Dali. But instead of using her inherent ability developed, certainly, in the cases of both by dint of long hard work to give vicarious thrilled of the unnatural and decadent, as Dali does, this artist tells a tale of the abstract forces of thought abroad in the world and attempts to give validity to the belief that the mind is real. She gives form to the ‘electronic structure,’ and these forms are no more unworldly than Dali’s melting watches. To do this, the artist devised a technique that defies analysis. She paints plasmas similarly to Matta’s, uses church window colors of intense reds and blues, creates forms which are neither plant nor animal nor human. But they are not 'non-objective.' For many are built around the figures of Biblical characters and there is deep beauty in the faces of the subjects.Two reviews also ran in the New York Herald Tribune, one entitled “Mystic Symbolism.” The other was by Carlyle Burrows, who called Peavy an “extraordinary creative talent, curiously romantic in its implications."
Throughout the 1940s, galleries continued to exhibit her work. In 1945, she showed her “Waterflames,” “Conception,” and “Sea of Life” series, as well as a painting called “The Supper of Peace,” at the Jurart Gallery at Sixth Avenue and Forty-sixth street. A year later, the Lawrence Terzian Gallery, 545 Fifth Avenue, New York, hosted a show of her work that was called “Genesis, Atomic Forces of Nature.” The New York Times ran an ambiguous review of the exhibition, while The Brooklyn Eagle printed a more favorable column on the paintings by Margaret Mara called “In Awe of Creative Powers, Impressionistic Painter of Biblical Parables Has Theories on Atom.” "In each of her paintings the artist depicts birth,” Mara writes, “which she describes as ‘the multiplying power of the human atom or life cell.’" By 1948, Peavy's work was being featured on posters sold by the American Cancer Society for fundraising purposes, who described her as “dedicating her life to a rich interpretation of the Bible.” Yet in the following decade, other than her development of a manikin made of articulated blocks for drawing in 1954, she seems to disappear from public view.
She must, however, have remained active as an artist and public figure because she appeared in live broadcasts of the Long John Nebel talk show on WOR in both 1958 and 1960. Nebel invited guests who had experienced paranormal events, including witchcraft, ghosts, UFOs, conspiracy theorists, and parasychology. Between 1954 and 1962, the show aired from midnight to 5:30 am seven days a week, and amassed a significant following across the continental United States. Peavy wore a mask, which Nebel described on air, and was in a trance through most of the interview. Lacamo spoke through her during the trance, and said "...we are using her exactly as you use your microphone. We are beings existing."
Over the last thirty years of her life, Peavy seems to have continued producing and exhibiting art, although she increasingly began to use film and text as her mediums. In 1961, the New York Tribune listed an exhibition of her recent paintings in Crown Gallery, 881 Seventh Ave, New York. On her undated resume, she wrote that she had produced 1,000 paintings, a number she would have certainly surpassed by the end of her life.
Masks
The mask that Peavy wore when she appeared on the Long John Nebel show in 1958 and 1960 was just one of many that she created to facilitate a deeper trance. Her creativity depended on achieving a dream-state, where she could contact the higher plane where Lacamo resided. Peavy often cut the base of the mask out of leather, or other materials such as velvet or lace. Using beads, feathers, lace, buttons, and costume jewelry, she would decorate each mask individually. Each received titles like “Royal Foursquare”, “Duo Genius” or “Monumental Redundant. In 1967, she received a patent for an invention called “Mask-Ezz,” which she describes as “adhesive facial covering devices and the like described as self-adhesive skin covering devices in sheet form, the adhesive layer of which impregnated with substances conducive to stimulating healing of the skin and layers therebelow when placed against the skin." It is unclear when she began making the masks, but they featured heavily in her later films, especially the 1985 film entitled The Artist Behind the Mask.Writings and Films
Peavy only began committing her philosophical ideas to the page later in life. In 1959, she began an unpublished manuscript entitled Various Kinds of Dissertations, which recorded various conversations with Lacamo and laid out her vision of the cosmos. When she finally finished the book in 1973, it was 121 pages long. She began to write poetry as well, including “Voice from Higher Dimensions” in 1960, which she claimed Lacamo had written through her. In another poem entitled “Resurrection of Atoms,” she articulates her view that reincarnation as a woman is the step before one-gender perfection as a pharaoh:Therefore, as each female had been all sub-creature forms –In the late 1980s, Peavy began writing her unpublished manuscript, The Story of My Life with a "UFO". Although the book is undated, she does mention the diseases Alzheimer’s, which did not become a major concern until 1977, and the Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which was not discussed nationally until the mid-1980s. In 1993, she copyrighted five manuscript books: Various Kinds of Dissertations, which was a compilation of various writings; The Mad Nightingale In Search of God; A Spoof On Psychology, Biology, Sexology, Symbology, Government, and Religion, which was written by Peavy and Lacamo according to the title page; Psychology of Art and Composition, which was largely a design book without text; Philosophy & Poetry, also jointly-authored by Peavy and Lacamo; and The Story of My Life with a "UFO."
Including a human male, ultimately she has graduated out from
All lower creature forms- eventually becoming a pharaoh -
And as a “creator pharaoh”- and eventually she
Graduates within the so-called higher dimension- as a UFO!
Peavy’s earliest film was Paulina, Artist-Philosopher, An Artist of Vision, which she copyrighted in 1981. That year, she exhibited it in the International Film & TV Festival of New York, where it won a bronze medal. For the next three years, she annually entered a film into the festival. In 1982, she won a bronze medal for Mountain of Myrrh, and another for Is the Moon a Burned-Out Sun in 1983. Male Sex then won her a silver award in 1984, and The Artist Behind the Mask won her final Bronze medal in 1985. Her films feature many of her paintings, which she narrates and describes in a calm voices accompanied by lilting music. Each capture a different aspect of her philosophy. Her final film, copyrighted in 1988, is Phantasma, Sixty Oil Paintings, A Self Portrait.