Thank you! I'm starting work on a nonfiction book on creativity and the first chapter is about the spiritualist artists and what they can teach us about inspiration. I'm pretty enthralled by them.
Have you read Georgiana Houghton's memoir? It's amazing because she attributes her paintings to possession by spirits like St Joseph, and that cultivated ego-death liberated her genius. But she's also passionately proud of her work even as she disavows authorship. The contradiction of creativity.
If you don't know her paintings take a look! She's the first abstract painter in the west--exhibited abstracts in 1871, four decades ahead of Kandinsky and about three and a half before af Klint--and she's scandalously unknown. And amazing!
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