Excerpt:
...When J. B. Murray was seventy years old, as he was
watering his potatoes one day he had a vision that the
sun came down to him and a spiritual eagle crossed his
eye. He believed that the eagle’s passage allowed him
to discern things that other people could not comprehend.
He saw Jesus on a cloud and he knew that God had set
him apart for a special work. The sun turned his hands
‘yellow-like’ and changed his life forever. This stimulus
compelled him to create mysterious writing, and to draw
nebulous figures trapped in a chaotic storm.
John Bunion Murray was born in 1908 and died at the
age of eighty. A farm worker, he lived in Mitchell,
a small rural town in the state of Georgia. His wife,
Cleo, with whom he had eleven children, died before
he began his art. He had just one month of formal education
and was non-literate.
Script, c.
1982–1986, 24 x 22 ins., 61 x 56 cm, ink and marker on
drawing paper, photo: Andy Nasisse (left); Later work
with metallic and opaque marker, ink and tempera on rose
coloured paper, 24 x 18 ins., 61 x 45.7 cm, photo courtesy:
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York (right)