Religion and the Arts 19 (2015) 339–388 RELIGION and the ARTS brill.com/rart Healing Vibrations through Visionary Art Maggie Atkinson Grenfell Campus Memorial University Abstract Nineteenth-century visionary artist Georgiana Houghton believed in the healing qual- ities of her art, and she educated religious teachers and clergy about the nature of her spiritual images. This article examines Houghton’s mediumistic paintings and seeks to demonstrate how her experimentation with vibrant colors and manipulation of form prefigured early modernist painting techniques. In addition, this analysis expands on how Houghton transformed her knowledge of the tenets of Spiritualism, which she amalgamated with her understanding of the science of botany to produce flower form spiritual portraits that she later developed into complex visionary abstracted pictures. Keywords women artists – visionary art – spirituality – religion – healing art – modernism … Circles are the highest symbols … Fragments are all parts of circular bodies, as a piece of granite rock is a part of those primitive formations that encircle the earth. Atoms gyrate upon their axes and follow the line of their strongest attractions. Things move in spirals … Sea-shells are built up spirally. Vines ascend forest trees spirally. Particles of steel flying toward a magnet move spirally. This law, with few exceptions, applies to atoms, worlds, systems, civilizations, and all those historic cycles of ever-recurring spiritual epochs and eras that distinguish antiquity. peebles, Seers of the Ages 191 ∵ © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/15685292-01904003 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 11:14:25PM via free access 340 atkinson In the mid-nineteenth century, British artist Georgiana Houghton produced abstracted and mystical paintings that incorporated layer upon layer of intri- cately rendered and interconnected circle and spiral shapes that revealed nine- teenth-century visionary ideas about the transcendental value and universal meaning and significance of circles.1 Houghton believed that she worked in collaboration with ethereal beings and she expressed ideas about the nature of the spiritual realms though her work.2 Her experimentation with vibrant colors and manipulation of form prefigured early modernist painting tech- niques, and the visionary nature of her pictures also foreshadowed mediu- mistic paintings produced by contemporary artists of the late twentieth cen- tury.3 The infinitely mutable qualities inherent in visionary imagery offer opportu- nities for both artists and viewers to transgress boundaries of time and topog- 1 Visionary images produced by women mediums, in particular, are difficult to locate and often fragile. Their pictures are rarely exhibited on the walls of art museums and instead are either lost or remain as reproductions in nineteenth-century Spiritualist journals. As a result, they are absent from most academic art historical literature. In some fortunate cases, however, visionary pictures are stored in manuscript collections or displayed on the walls of Spiritualist churches. 2 See Alex Owen, The Darkened Room, and Ann Broude, Radical Spirits. Other studies of the role of women in Spiritualism include Laurence Moore, “The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America”; Vieda Skultans, “Mediums, Controls and Emi- nent Men,” in Women’s Religious Experience; Judith R. Walkowitz, “Science and the Séance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre in Late Victorian London”; Molly McGarry, “Spectral Sexualitites: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Moral Panics, and the Making of us Obscen- ity Law”; Katherine H. Porter, Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle; Howard Kerr, Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Lit- erature 1850–1900; Russell and Clare Goldfarb, Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters; Diana Basham, The Trail of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Litera- ture and Society; Vanessa Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural; and Sarah Willburns, Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings. 3 Canadian artist Alma Rumball’s (1902–1978) visionary paintings have been exhibited at venues throughout Ontario, Canada including the Art Gallery of Ontario, York University Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of Mississauga. Her mediumistic images were also featured in Jeremiah Munce’s award winning documentary “The Alma Drawings,” presented at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto Ontario in 2005. Scholars of the late twentieth century have studied her visionary representations and imagery, arguing that they were meant to act as educational tools while they were also meant to facilitate unconscious spiritual and physical healing in viewers. See Wendy Oke, “An Artistic Pioneer: Alma Rumball Pioneer in Art and in Spirit” 33–38. Religion and the Arts 19 (2015) 339–388 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 11:14:25PM via free access healing vibrations through visionary art 341 raphy, and thus, in the case of Houghton’s imagery, to imagine spatial manipu- lations in many different ways through her treatment of space and transforma- tion of fixed and individual subjectivities. Interstitial space is theorized as exist- ing as a window through which to renegotiate and perhaps re-conceptualize interpretations of the material world.4 Houghton’s images, conceived of as the product of discourse between the material and spiritual spheres, disrupt bor- ders created by physical constructions of time and space. Houghton believed that her art, a synthesis of Spiritualism, religious conviction, and artistic prac- tice, culminated in intricately rendered drawings and paintings that encour- aged spiritual enlightenment and healing in viewers. Houghton wrote in detail about the healing qualities that she believed her mediumistic paintings possessed, and she trusted that they were endowed with immense spiritual power. She wrote that unseen entities impressed upon her which drawings would most benefit particular viewers and that these individ- uals, simply by being in the vicinity of her spirit pictures, would experience sensations of healing (Houghton, Evenings at Home 1. 59). Houghton wrote that although people of the material world were too often absorbed in their day-to- day lives to be aware of the inherent spiritual power of her art, she believed that viewers: “nevertheless benefited both bodily and mentally by coming within the influence” of her mediumistic paintings.5 She taught that if viewers spent time in contemplation of her images they would eventually gain understanding of the symbolic intention embedded in her spirit drawings and would expe- rience both physical healing and an intense spiritual awakening (Evenings at Home 1. 61). Even writers for the local Spiritual journals who made light of Houghton’s paintings commented on the “spiritualising influence” of her pic- tures: There is a group of nine pictures in the right-hand corner which exercise a most wonderful influence on the mind of the beholder. A calm, peaceful, harmonious, spiritualising influence steals over the consciousness. The cares and animosities of life seem to flee away and a new and higher atmosphere is respired … This, indeed, is the special merit of these works. They grow upon the affections the longer they are examined, and though 4 See three texts by Homi K. Bhabha: “DissemiNation” 139–170; The Location of Culture; and “Culture’s in-between.” 5 Oberter, Esoteric Art 229. Thirty-five of Houghton’s mediumistic paintings were donated to the still-active spiritualist community Victorian Spiritualists’ Union in Melbourne, Australia in the early twentieth century. The watercolors line the wall of the meeting room, with a photograph of the text on the back hung below each watercolor. Religion and the Arts 19 (2015) 339–388 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 11:14:25PM via free access 342 atkinson no tangible description of the effect may be possible, yet you feel the spirit has been enriched and gratified by the result. “Miss Houghton’s Exhibition of Spirit Drawings” 296 Houghton’s abstracted watercolor The Omnipresence of the Lord (1862) (fig. 1), which appears to vibrate from beneath the surface of the pigment in a tran- scendental sweep of energetic line and color, is an example of an image that was meant to activate self-healing and transcendental experience in view- ers. Houghton’s drawing exudes a timeless quality, depicting a space in which time and place are irrelevant. Her image emanates an ethereal luminosity as though light rather than tint was used to create the background over which spiraling white lines guide the viewer’s eye throughout the surface of the image. Houghton’s multiple layers of interconnected lines over color oscillate between order/disorder, recession/advance, movement/stasis, material/imma- terial, instantaneous/continuous, moment in time/eternity, resolve/dissolve, figurative/non-figurative, order/chaos, temporal/spatial, interior/exterior, and microcosm/macrocosm, producing a sense of multi-layered, multi-dimen- sional, and multi-temporal spaces. Applications of vibrant yellows, reds, and greens appear to pulsate beneath coils of bright streaks that help to integrate unbound energies with stabilizing influences. Houghton’s image relates notions of the mechanisms of the interior body in the form of active cells, and essentially what we might now perceive of as molecules and dna sequences,