The Meaning of Serafina of Sanlis's Paintings Imagine: a quiet French town of Sanlis, the beginning of the 20th century. A cleaner who washes floors in rich houses and churches writes strange, terrifyingly beautiful paintings by lamp light at night. No one orders them, they are needed only by her. Her name is Serafina Louise, known to the world as Serafina of Sanlis. Her paintings are a blend of religious ecstasy, madness, and the unseen power of colors. She had no artistic education, but her works hang in the Louvre. What is the meaning of her paintings? Why do they fascinate and scare at the same time? Who is Serafina? Serafina Louise was born in 1864 in a poor family. She became an orphan early, worked as a maid. In her free time, she gathered berries, roots, flowers, ground them into powder to get paints. She wrote on boards and canvases that she traded or found. Her technique was "reverse pointillism"? No, it was something unique: she applied paint with a spatula, fingers, sometimes directly from the tube, creating relief strokes resembling leaves, feathers, tongues of flame. In 1912, the German collector Wilhelm Ude, living in Sanlis, accidentally saw her painting at a dinner party and was stunned. He bought all her works, began to support her. But after the crisis of the 1930s, Serafina fell into madness, she was placed in a psychiatric clinic where she died in 1942, forgotten. Later, Ude returned and brought her name to prominence. Style: Naive Art or Primitivism Serafina belongs to the primitives (in France they were called "singers of the sacred heart"). Her works lack perspective, anatomical accuracy, the laws of light and shadow. But this is their strength. She wrote what she saw with an inner eye. Subjects: fruits, leaves, flowers, but unnaturally large, hypertrophied, as if under a microscope. The background is often black or dark blue, making the fruits seem to glow. Strokes are swirling, resembling tongues of flame. In mature works, feathers ... Read more