What is Psychopictography or Mediumistic Painting?
Psychopictography, or mediumistic painting, is defined as a process in which a sensitive medium creates drawings or paintings under spiritual influence. According to the Spiritist Doctrine1, it is a mediumistic manifestation in which a spirit expresses itself artistically through a medium, using a variety of techniques.
This faculty demonstrates the continuity of life after death, using art as an instrument to promote healing, to transmit beneficial energies, and to help others. Using brushes, fingertips, or even their feet, mediums channel colours and nuances that often bring health and peace to those present.
Spirit painters, when manifesting through psychopictography, imprint their works with characteristics that faithfully recall their style and signature while incarnate. This artistic coherence reinforces the authenticity of the phenomenon.
Allan Kardec explains that mediumistic communication is related to the nature of the communicating spirit. Spirits of poets, musicians, designers, and others seek mediums who best serve as instruments for their manifestations, just as a violinist chooses the most suitable violin to play their music. In the case of psychopictography, discarnate painters use skilful mediums to reproduce their works.
Mediumship presents an infinite variety of nuances which constitute what are called special mediums, and which pertain to particular aptitudes not yet defined, apart from the qualities and knowledge of the Spirit that manifests.
— Allan Kardec, The Medium’s Book, Ch XVI “Special Mediums”
The importance of psychopictography
In the book Atualidade do Pensamento Espírita (Currentness of Spiritist Thought), psychographed by Brazilian medium Divaldo Pereira Franco, the spirit Vianna de Carvalho emphasises that “psychopictography is a noble resource of art, which confirms the survival of the spirit after the molecular separation of the body”. The characteristics, styles and messages present in the works are an expressive contribution to the affirmation of the continuity of life, as well as bringing beauty and harmony to people.
This mediumistic manifestation enchants not only because of the beauty of the works produced, but also because of their relevance as irrefutable proof of the continuity of life.
- Spiritism, or the Spiritist Doctrine, is a spiritualist philosophy, codified by Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, under the pseudonym Allan Kardec, in 1850s France. ↩︎