Paulina Peavy

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. Most of her works are undated, but it is presumed that she began working in this style of oil painting during the 1930s, perhaps while at the Chouinard Art Institute, 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.”[12] 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.[19] 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.”[20]

Between 1975 and 1984, Peavy worked 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.[19]

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 1936, Peavy exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Stanford University, the Gump Galleries in San Francisco,[21] the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles, the Palos Verdes Gallery in Palos Verdes,[11] and Delphic Studios in New York City.[2] In early 1936, 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.”[22]

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.[23] Artist Diego Rivera was on site painting a mural at the Exposition during the following year. 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.”[24] 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?[25]

In 1941, Peavy debuted a large panel of the biblical “last supper” at the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery. 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 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 around 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.[19] In 1943, 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.”[26] In 1943, Peavy had a solo exhibition in Manhattan at the Argent Gallery. Art Digest's Maud Riley wrote a glowing review of her exhibition in an article entitled “Electronics in Paint”:[27]

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.[12]

A review also ran in the New York Herald Tribune written by Carlyle Burrows under the heading “Mystic Symbolism.”[28] He described Peavy's work as showing an “extraordinary creative talent, curiously romantic in its implications."[29]

Throughout the 1940s, galleries continued to exhibit her work. In 1945, she showed her “Waterflames,” “Conception,” and “Sea of Life” series, as well as her large “last supper” painting under the title “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,[30] 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.”[12] “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.’”[12] 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.”[31] 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.[21]

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.[32][33] 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.[33] 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.”[34][35][36]

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.[37] 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.

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.”[38] It is unclear when she made many of the masks, but they featured heavily in her later films, especially the 1985 film entitled The Artist Behind the Mask.

She received a patent in 1966[39] 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.”[40]

Peavy's extant writings include several examples of her 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.[41] 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 –

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![42]

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 (AIDS), which was not discussed nationally until the mid-1980s.[23] 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.”[43]

Peavy, having experimented with filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, worked with a small production studio to complete a series of films in the 1980s. The first of these 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.[19]