Paulina Peavy
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 advanced beings, or UFOs (“Unidentified Foreign Objects”).
[9] Shortly before graduating from Oregon State, the art department was temporarily closed due to McLouth's untimely death from influenza in 1923.
[2] Independent for the first time in her life, Peavy and her two sons continued to live in San Pedro before settling in Long Beach, California in the mid-1930s.
According to a later interview in a New York newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle, she taught in the art department of a school in Long Beach for 14 years.
[17] 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 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.”[18] 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.
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.”[15] But her philosophy of the cosmos moved beyond established theosophical and religious tests.
She also recalls that Lacamo instructed her to “reduce all capitallised [sic] words in the Bible- to their low case and then wholly scientific meanings; as example- biology- embryology- etc.
[20] 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.
[22] 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.
The tongue of flames ascend and descend of the egg nucleus and then there is light.”[23] Between 1975 and 1984, Peavy worked with watercolor, pen, collage, and ink.
[22] 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.
In 1939, she was invited to participate in the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California, where she showed thirty paintings in the Temple of Religion and gave daily lectures.
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.”[27] 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.
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.
Art Digest's Maud Riley wrote a glowing review of her exhibition in an article entitled “Electronics in Paint”:[30] Mrs. Peavy has technical equipment equal to Dali.
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.
[15]A review also ran in the New York Herald Tribune written by Carlyle Burrows under the heading “Mystic Symbolism.”[31] He described Peavy's work as showing an “extraordinary creative talent, curiously romantic in its implications.
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,[33] 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.”[15] “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.’”[15] 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.”[34] 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.
[24] 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.
[35][36] Nebel invited guests who had experienced paranormal events, including witchcraft, ghosts, UFOs, conspiracy theorists, and parasychology.
We are beings existing.”[37][38][39] 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.
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.
She received a patent in 1966[42] and a trademark (72185234) in 1967 for an invention called “Mask-Eez,” 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 [sic] when placed against the skin.”[43]
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.
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 (AIDS), which was not discussed nationally until the mid-1980s.
On the resume, she lists having held various jobs, from an art teacher for the New York City Board of Education to an architectural and engineering drafts-person for various companies.
In addition, she lists herself as a lecturer at City College New York and at the American Museum of Natural History, where she spoke about “Phillians.”[14] Although she showed at many galleries, she did not seem to find much commercial success.
