First published: Winter 1998
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.
