Elinor Peck Severinghaus

1925 - 2015

Elinor Peck Severinghaus An artist of distinction and gifted teacher as well as a loving wife and mother, died on March 16th, 2015 after a long illness. Elinor was born on January 10, 1925, in the Mam region of the western highlands of Guatemala, the first child of H. Dudley Peck and Dorothy Miller Peck, Presbyterian missionaries. She was schooled at home by her mother using the Calvert School Correspondence method until age 13, when she was sent to Philadelphia to Friends Select School, and after a year, to the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1946. She worked as a traveling fellow of the National Presbyterian Church. She obtained an M.A. in religious education from New York University in 1949. She met John W. Severinghaus while he was working on Radar at MIT in 1943, and they were married in Northfield in the Sage Chapel on August 28, 1948, exactly 26 years after her parents had been wed in the same place. After John received his MD from Columbia University in 1949, Elinor spent two years teaching at the Kent School in Cooperstown, NY, while he interned there. In 1951, they served the Native American community at two Presbyterian national mission hospitals in Ganado, AZ and Embudo, NM. Her first child was born a month after moving to Philadelphia while John began training in anesthesiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She and John moved to Bethesda, MD, when he was doctor-drafted into the US Public Health Service, working from 1953 to 1958 at the National Institutes of Health. In 1958, Elinor, John and three children, Ed, Jean, and Wendy, moved to Ross, CA, when John became Professor of Anesthesia at UCSF. Jeffrey, her fourth child, arrived the next year. Along with her deepening interests in Buddhism and increasing appreciation of Unitarian philosophy, she led John to join the Unitarian Congregation of Marin in 1962 where they both have remained active members. She and John spent two sabbatical years with their children in Denmark, and two other sabbaticals in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and at Oxford University. They traveled widely, most often to John's professional meetings. It was in Marin County that Elinor's life as an artist and teacher blossomed. She trained as a watercolorist with Richard Yip in the 1960s and joined the "Sight and Insight" art group in Mill Valley, founded by Richard and Ann O'Hanlon. She was influenced by the works of Carl Jung and explored Zen Buddhism. In 1972, she collaborated with her friend Suzi Martin to publish an illustrated book that expressed Ann O'Hanlon's teachings, "According to Ann". Elinor worked in a variety of media and was a member of the Bay Area abstract expressionist movement. Elinor's paintings and drawings, her writings and teaching, were also profoundly influenced by the spiritual values that she developed in her migration from the Presbyterian Church to Unitarianism, a humanism, an openness, kindness, and generosity that touched not only her children and the young students of her perception workshops, but everyone who was lucky enough to cross paths with her. Elinor remarkably made a friend of almost everyone she met, and, as an artist and teacher, she had an exceptional rapport with children, whom she, like Wordsworth, believed trailed clouds of glory -- their innocence, their immediacy and freshness of perception epitomized what she believed was at the heart of art making. As her friend Joan Sandler wrote in a poem honoring Elinor's 90th birthday, So as you go out and look at your world, pretend you've not seen it before; Just stop still and spy at what catches your eye, and the moment will open the door. A collection of her art is available at http://www. elinorsoeuvre.com/index.html. Elinor Peck Severinghaus is survived by her husband John, by her four children, Edwin, of El Cerrito; Jean, of Greenbrae; Wendy, of Bennington, VT and her partner Milton Djuric; and Jeffrey, of Solana Beach, CA and his wife Lynne Talley, by her grandchildren Alex and Sarah Severinghaus, by her brother, William J. Peck of Chapel Hill, NC and her sister Dorothy and husband Stanley Foster of Sautee, GA.