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. Around 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 would later recall that she first encountered “Lacamo”, a spirit from another world whom she called her “spirit muse,” during one of the weekly trance 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 (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”).
Early life Pauline Peavy (White) was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado on August 24, 1901. Peavy's family lived in Colorado until 1906. The family moved West to Portland, Oregon that year, where Peavy spent much of her childhood. At the age of eight, her mother died, leaving her father to raise her. In her unpublished manuscript The Story of My Life with a UFO, Peavy recalls that, “it was my father’s belief that education would be wasted on girls ----- as they only shall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.” After elementary school, Peavy's father encouraged her to attend Portland's Benson Polytechnic High School, where co-education was relatively new. At that time, trade courses for female students were limited to cooking and sewing.
White later attended Oregon State University where she first studied art. Her mentor was the art department chair and acclaimed American illustrator, Farley McLouth. While a student at the university, she met her future husband, Bradley A. Peavy (b. 1898). The Peavys were a powerful family in Corvallis, Oregon. Bradley’s father, George Wilcox Peavy, was the dean of the forestry college. He would later become the president of the college and mayor of Corvallis. Shortly before graduating from Oregon State, the art department was temporarily closed due to McLouth's untimely death from influenza in 1923. The closure forced White to change majors. Instead of art, she completed her degree in vocational education. She married Peavy the same year. The following year the couple moved to southern California. Peavy gave birth to two sons while living in San Pedro, California. Her first son, Bradley Adelbert Peavy, was born in 1924 and her second son, Wesley Peavy, was born in 1926.
In 1927, Paulina Peavy won an advanced scholarship for 9 months paid tuition at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now part of the California Institute of the Arts) where she would eventually study with visiting artists Hans Hofmann and Morgan Russell. An undated resume she later wrote indicates that she finished her MA at Chouinard, although the school did not yet officially offer such a degree at that time. In 1929, Paulina opened the Peavy Studio of Art and Architecture and Peavy Art Gallery in San Pedro in a building she had designed. The venue hosted classes by Peavy and others as well as exhibitions of contemporary art. As a young woman, Paulina found herself married to an alcoholic man prone to violence. She filed for divorce in 1932. While Paulina was in a sanitarium for tuberculosis in early 1933, 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.
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. She supported the family by teaching art in local schools. For a period, she left the boys with 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 in the art department of a school in Long Beach for 14 years. After living in California since 1923, she moved to New York, New York in 1943, where she remained until the age of 97.
Spiritual and philosophical ideas
In about 1932, Peavy began attending weekly séances at the home of Ida Ewing of Santa Ana, 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.” Although Lacamo originally channeled his communications through Ewing, eventually the spirit "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 [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.”Mountain of Myrrh/The UFO, 1982, 25.5 minutes. 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 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 [sic] 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, block printing, 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. 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.” 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.”UFO Identified, 1987
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.
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 1936, Peavy exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Stanford University, the Gump Galleries in San Francisco, the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles, the Palos Verdes Gallery in Palos Verdes, and Delphic Studios in New York City. 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.”