Baptism by Abraham Hunter

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12x24 Signed & Numbered Gicleé

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Edition size: 95

12x24 Artist Proof Gicleé

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Edition Size: 15

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18x36 Signed & Numbered Gicleé

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Edition Size: 50

18x36 Artist Proof Gicleé

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Edition Size: 10

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24x48 Signed & Numbered Gicleé

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Edition Size: 15

24x48 Artist Proof Gicleé

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Edition Size: 5

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This painting is maybe a bit odd unless I explain the story. I am unsure every reason why, not to get too detailed, but there's a feeling inside me that thirty years of life on this big blue rock has yet to uncover why it is there or totally what it is, and I have felt a greater need to use my mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties to figure it out. I've spent a lot of hours this year at the easel day and night, searching. Last winter while working I found an album on Spotify of spirituals compiled on old phonograph recordings of the songs of the old south. I couldn't stop listening. I just imagined being at an old river baptism and hearing those soulful spiritual voices find easing of pain in the faith that brought them through a difficult and tiresome life.

I've been asked a lot lately to return to religious subject matter. Due to the place I am in my private life, I have found it very hard to authentically paint something sacred that I wasn't feeling, or perhaps was tired of trying to feel and not fully finding. I need a "burning bush" moment like Moses. My thoughts also turn to my grandparents who have led a spiritual life and lived to old age and I've seen them have a quiet confidence that I have yet to find anywhere else. I remember going to church with them just once. It was a small spirit-filled church in southern Illinois. I believe we and them were the only Caucasian people there. The songs of the spirituals on that album made me think of the people in that church singing and fellowshipping together. I also remember going to visit the church my grandmother went to as a child named Kornthal and even though it was vacated and in disrepair, it felt like a connection to a previous century still standing.

With all these thoughts intertwining I decided to just start imagining a painting and working out my personal journey on canvas. Unsure of what I was feeling, I found it best to just paint it.

This painting features a large oak with Spanish moss hanging, common in the south. With the light source behind the tree, the scene could be about the Tree of Life. For me it's symbolic of the burning bush, where Moses was told that the voice speaking to him was "I AM". The fall colors and the coming rain is derived from a phrase commonly used to describe a spiritual outpouring I heard a lot about growing up called "the latter rain", a description of the rains before harvest in ancient Mesopotamia. The scene is of a river baptism at a black church like we visited. Yes there's a few whites symbolic of the few at my grandparents church, including me if you can find me. In the New Testament there's a phenomenon of "baptized with the water then receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit", where "tongues as of fire" rested on the heads of the disciples of Christ in the upper room. The light poking through the live oak trees I used to illustrate the tongues of fire. The church is inspired by Kornthal, the church my grandmother went to as a little child. I may have missed a few boards and tiles for it to be exact, but I painted it almost in a childlike manner, for I must be as a child. And finally there is a dove gently landing on the top of the tree for those with good eyesight. I've read its not the only time a dove has alighted during a baptism.

Was this painting my "burning bush" moment, or did I figure it all out? No. But it was a bundle of feelings and inner workings I was having over the course of months that just needed to be expressed, if only to say to my grandparents and everyone in my past "I love you and feel you". And perhaps also it was my way of sending a signal out there to the unseen, to space, to Spirit, God, to the Source that creates, to enlightenment or self actualization, to even my pain perhaps?... whatever is causing this stirring feeling that a brain can't rationalize... to say I am here, seeking.

~Abraham Hunter

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