Paulina Peavy

Paulina Peavy (1901-1999) 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.While in a trance during one of the weekly meetings, Peavy said that she first encountered "Lacamo", a spirit from another world whom she called her "spirit muse". 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 (and Lacamo’s) belief that humanity was slowly moving toward an androgynous species, which she called “one-gender perfection,” through contact with alien species, or UFOs (Unidentified Foreign Objects). In her consideration of a future-sex and post-masculine world, Peavy’s work aligns with those of Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, and Forest Bess.

Paulina Peavy was born Pauline Ellen White in Old Colorado City, Colorado (now part of Colorado Springs) 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 passed away, leaving her 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 In her unpublished manuscript The Story of My Life with a “UFO,” Peavy recalls that “it was my father’s belief that education would be wasted on girls ----- as they only shall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 (b. 1890), 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, and would become the president of the college, and later the mayor of Corvallis. The couple moved to southern California and Paulina Peavy gave birth to her first son, Bradley Adelbert Peavy, in San Pedro, California, in 1924 and to her second, Wesley Peavy, two years later in 1926. As a young woman, Paulina found herself married to an alcoholic prone to violence. While Paulina was in a sanitarium for tuberculosis around 1930, 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 (now part of the California Institute of the Arts) 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.

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 (pronounced LA-cum-mo), a spirit that Peavy called a UFO, or “Unidentified Foreign Object.” Originally channeled through Ewing, and eventually the spirit would "speak" directly. In her 1982 film, Mountain of Myrrh/UFO, she describes her first encounter with the UFO, describing it as 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 [meaning sound], 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 (1877) 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 her 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.” Peavy recalls Lacamo instructing her to “reduce all capitallised [sic] words in the Bible- to their low case and then wholly scientific meanings; as example- biology- embryology- etc.!” Spiritualism, the supernatural, and scientific inquiry came together in both her philosophy and images.

Yet as Peavy developed an individualized perspective on the cosmos. She believed Lacamo and other spirits to be aliens rather than evidence of the presence of the dead. 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. Peavy felt able to decode wisdom from ancient times (that had been mistranslated by underdeveloped men), helping us to evolve and bring about a better future.

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 were 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 her interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, Peavy says, “My new technique came 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 says that her watercolors depict 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 and her earlier works with her name as well as Lacamo’s. Many of the watercolors are dated, the earliest in 1953, and 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 reported on by the Army and Navy Journal, who referred to her as “a noted California artist.”

In 1939, she was invited to participate in the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California, and 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 image 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 would evolve as described in her book The Story of My Life With a "UFO" and in her film 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, beards, 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 (as yet not understood) 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's Maud Riley wrote a glowing review of her exhibition in an article titled “Electronics in Paint”:

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 though 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.

Two reviews also ran in the New York Herald Tribune, one titled “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 work, 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, her 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 purportedly 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, NY. On her undated resume, she wrote that 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 materials like beads, feathers, lace, buttons, and costume jewelry, she would decorate each mask individually. And received titles like “Royal Foursquare”, “Duo Genius” or “Monumental Redundant. In 1967, she received a patent (72185234) 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 heating of the skin and layers therebelow [sic] 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 worldview. When she finally finished the book in 1973, it was 121 pages long. She began to record 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 –

Including a human male, ultimately she has graduated out from

All lower creature forms- eventually becoming a pharaoh (fair-oh)-

And as a “creator pharaoh”- and eventually she

Graduates within the so-called higher dimension- as a UFO!

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 Alzheimer’s, which did not become a major concern until 1977, and the Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), 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." 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 enters a film into the festival. In 1982, she won a bronze medal for Mountain of Myrrhand another for Is the Moon a Burned-Out Sun in 1983. Male Sexthen 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, narrated by 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.

Very little is known of Peavy’s personal life after she moved to New York, NY, in 1942. Her undated resume, left behind in ephemera kept by her family, sketches a faint picture of her movements. At the top of the page, her address reads 390 West End Avenue, New York, NY, which places her in the Upper West Side and a marketing postcard with an address at 320 West 78thStreet. She seems to have held various jobs, from an art teacher for the New York City Board of Education to an architectural and engineer draftsman for various companies. In addition, she lists herself as a lecturer at City College New York in Sachs Quality Store and at the American Museum of Natural History on “Phillians.” Although she showed at many galleries, she did not seem to find much commercial success. Likely, she supported herself by working odd jobs and teaching art. A 1954 article in the New York Herald Tribune describing the theft of a valuable statuette of Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower from a booth at the National Antique Show in Madison Square Garden describes a “Mrs. Pauline Peavy” as an assistant at the hall. According to her family, she began showing signs of dementia around 1996. Her son Bradley moved her to a nursing home in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1998 after she broke her hip. She died there in 1999, at the age of 98.

Despite some success during her lifetime, Peavy was relatively forgotten by the time she died. Her family kept her papers, paintings, and drawings, tucked away in a basement corner. A retrospective of her work, A Message to Paulina, was held at the Greater Reston Art Center in 2018; a Washington Post review described it as "exuberant, kaleidoscopic and beckoning".