Inner Pageant:
The Paintings of Marylou Reifsnyder

(Excerpted from “Head into Heart: The Visionary Art of Marylou Reifsnyder”)

Marylou Reifsnyder had a rich inner life. She contemplated the mysteries, listened to the angels, and speculated on the spiritual fate of humanity. Often she expressed her visions in her art and, over a thirty-year period, she produced a body of paintings, drawings, poetry, toys, carvings, and books that evoke the magic of her internal musings.

Drawn to a variety of mystical philosophies, Reifsnyder explored the religious iconography of many times and places. She studied the images of ancient mythology, medieval alchemy, tarot, astrology, Christian theology, and the cosmic fables of William Blake, transforming them into the symbols of her own spiritual quest. Virtually self-taught as an artist, Reifsnyder also synthesized various expressive traditions in the development of her own aesthetic. Her fantastic narrative style drew inspiration from such diverse sources as Italian Renaissance painting, medieval manuscripts, southwestern santos, Spanish painting, traditional art from India, Africa, Mexico, and Japan, as well as the highly stylized figuration of early American limnar portraits.

Perhaps most importantly, Reifsnyder’s art was rooted in her own mystical experiences. She attested that all of her paintings came to her in a “visionary way,” and, with regard to her creative process, she referred to herself as an “awed spectator.” She further explained:
“My poems and pictures seem to be a grand dramatic procession from the psyche, a pageant of tragic, joyous and ridiculous spirits marching on all paths and straying off across the thorny hills, going their purposefulway and attracting me along.”
Reifsnyder began making art when she was a few years old. The first inspiration for her prolific drawings was a Mother Goose picture book, succeeded in her later childhood by a treasured collection of Shirley Temple photographs. During the decades that followed, she persevered in her art through the demands of motherhood, family, and earning a living. In 1955 the artist became assistant registrar at the Yale Art Gallery—a position that proved to be highly inspirational. She recalled, “I loved the thousands of objects there. Inanimate things come to life for me, and I loved being with them in the galleries and storerooms.” Then, in the early 1960s, Reifsnyder, who had just entered her forties, quit her job to devote more time to her family and her creative work.

Reifsnyder’s descriptions of her life sometimes hint at the strange dichotomy between her day-to-day domestic chores and her visionary art, between the routines of motherhood and housewifery and the compelling mysteries of the “inner pageant” that beckoned her. In the artist’s own blunt words, “household distractions easily break a spell.” But even more often, Reifsnyder saw connections between such activities and viewed her art as one part of the larger mystical adventure that encompassed all aspects of her life. She said, “For me, art flows to and fro, back and forth, from the banal to the sublime and is always present . . . Birth, Death, Satori [Enlightenment], Art, Kettle-Boiling, Baby-Crying, and Love is all One.”

For Reifsnyder, art was a medium for her spiritual life. She was not alone. In recent years, a growing interest in the works of self-taught artists, like Reifsnyder, has brought attention to a once invisible “tradition” of other women whos art arises from mystical practices. Assisted by divine forces, southern artist Minnie Evans commingled her own dream imagery with Biblical subject matter to conjure scenes of a heavenly domain, lushly grown with mysterious vegetation and inhabited by angels, serpents, deities, and mythical beasts. Visionary artist Anna Zemankova from Czechoslovakia awoke before dawn, when she was in touch with vitalistic forces, to create her mystic drawings of exotic plant species and haunting biomorphic images. Texas artist Chelo Amezcua believed that art was a combination of magic, mystery, and mysticism, and she captured these qualities in her “filigree”drawings of gardens, temples, saints, rulers, and winged muses. With a similar devotion to the world of the spirit, Reifsnyder once matter-of-factly explained, “There were angels around me, and I made pictures of them.”