Séraphine Louis, known as Séraphine de Senlis (Séraphine of Senlis) (1864–1942), was a French painter in the naïve style. Self-taught, she was inspired by her religious faith and by stained-glass church windows and other religious art. The intensity of her images, both in colour and in replicative designs, are sometimes interpreted as a reflection of her own psyche, walking a tightrope between ecstasy and mental illness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9raphine_Louis

Films about “mad women artists” seem to be proliferating in France recently. Séraphine tells the story of Séraphine Louis (1864-1942?), played superbly by Yolande Moreau, a poor and simple domestique who began painting in middle age. Séraphine’s is a profoundly private, solitary world, and some visiting local nuns hint that she previously had problems with her mental health. Séraphine has no family, we learn, and her only daily conversations involve rote exchanges with the people she encounters as she goes about her work routines. She passes her days performing the same set of physically demanding chores whose repetitive nature comforts her.

In Séraphine’s adult life, nature, Catholic religion—especially the cult of the Virgin Mary—and painting are the great sources of solace and meaning. Mostly, she paints flowers, but interestingly the images emerge entirely from her mind rather than direct views of nature in the plein air Impressionist manner. Séraphine applies the paint with a brush and her fingers. When she can’t afford color paints, she grinds them herself from the physical world —from red wine, animal blood, flower juice, and church candle wax. She paints on small wooden panels, and the brilliant floral tones contrast markedly with her drab clothes and affectless life, as well as the picturesque stone buildings of the small village she inhabits.  (The setting is intended to be Senlis, a tiny Picardie town, near Chantilly, about 40 miles north of Paris.) Eventually her art will be labelled “primitivist;” in her case, however, the source of inspiration is not the African savannah but the French rural countryside. For a sense of her style, think Van Gogh married with Grandma Moses.

Worth reading this in full' 

http://h-france.net/fffh/maybe-missed/2326/