Marian Spore Bush - Spiritualism and Painting

Spiritualism and Painting

As Flora Marian Spore, "she became well-known for a new and unusual technique, sometimes using paint so thick it seemed as much sculpture as painting. Brilliant color, power, and an unquestioned sense of design of a new and mystic school brought her work to the attention of art critics who reviewed her paintings with interest and favor."

Flora Marian was "an early participant in an exploration of the field of extrasensory perception in collaboration with Dr. Walter Prince of the Boston Psychic Society. She believed firmly in life after life and the ability of the dead to communicate with the living through mental means. She felt that her painting was inspired and her art guided by artists long dead," perhaps originally introduced to her through the spirit of her deceased mother. Yet she also insisted that she was not a spiritualist or a medium, nor did she believe in physical manifestations from "the other side of the veil."

Harry Houdini, an arch-enemy of spiritualists, was fascinated by her artwork. In 1924, Houdini's remarks about her paintings were printed in the New York Sun: "It is a great exhibition. I am certain of Miss Spore's honesty. I have never excluded the possibility of supernatural intervention from my belief. I have been engaged in the exposure of criminal fakers… there is no question of that here. Miss Spore has something beautiful and is conveying it to her fellow men.".

Flora Marian Spore's paintings were exhibited in the most conservative and prestigious art galleries of New York City: Knoedler's, Wildenstein's, Grand Central Art Galleries and also the Fine Arts Gallery of London, "where art critics, society reporters, and psychiatrists, as well as crowds of the general public, flocked to see them." She received much publicity from both the mainstream press and sensationalist tabloids, which printed such articles as "Mystic voices led her to romance, fame and wealth" and "Pictures my mother sends me from beyond the grave."