Akiane Kramarik had spent months searching for someone who resembled the face she said she had seen in visions. She wanted to paint Jesus. But the right model remained out of reach.
Finally, the young artist made a desperate request.
“God, if you really want me to paint this face, send him through the front door,” she recalled praying.
The next day, she said, someone knocked.
Speaking with Sean Hannity on “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” Kramarik described the extraordinary encounter behind “Prince of Peace,” the portrait of Jesus she painted at just 8 years old.
Standing at the door, she recalled, was an almost 7-foot-tall man she later learned was a carpenter.
“I was sent by somebody. I heard that someone in this family needed a model. I’m here,” she recalled him saying.
Kramarik turned to her mother and told her in Lithuanian that this was the person she had been searching for.
Years of images, sketches and determination were about to become a face on canvas.
Kramarik said the story began around age 3½ to 4, long before she had the words to explain what was happening. Her family was poor, but close. Her mother was an atheist, and her father was agnostic with a nonpracticing Catholic background.
Order Randy Kay’s New Book, “Heaven Encounters” on Amazon.com!
Religion was not a topic of household conversation.
Then came the dreams, followed by visions she described as overwhelmingly real. At their center was a presence she associated with light, love and an intimate knowledge of every person.
“And it felt so much like home,” Kramarik said. “And this presence was so a part of my everyday experiences.”
Unable to fully explain what she saw, she began drawing. The face emerged gradually: hair, a nose, an eye, a shawl.
By about age 7½, she said, the complete image had appeared.
“It was meant to be painted at all cost. At all cost,” she said.
Kramarik had no formal art training. She practiced with whatever she could find, driven by a determination to reproduce what she remembered.
“My formal training was real life experiences,” she said. “I would just get anything I can around the house and try to teach myself.”
She also sensed guidance beyond her own efforts.
“I feel like the more I was doing it, the more clear it was,” she said. “The more I felt like there was something guiding me.”
Finding a model became the next obstacle. Her mother took her from place to place, but months passed without success. That search ended, Kramarik said, with the prayer and the carpenter’s arrival.
Then the painting began.
The approximately 40 hours she spent creating the portrait stretched across sessions that sometimes continued deep into the night. Her mother would discover her working at 2 a.m. Her younger brother would wake at 4 a.m. and find her still painting.
“He would sit on my chair next to me and just watch me paint,” she said. “And I would do it all hours of the day as much as I can.”
Hannity connected the portrait to Colton Burpo, whose account of heaven became the book and film “Heaven Is for Real.” Hannity recounted Burpo identifying the image as the Jesus he said he had encountered.
For Kramarik, hearing another child recognize the face brought an overwhelming sense that the painting’s reach extended beyond its creation.
“I felt that the moment I painted this painting, it was out of my hands,” she said.
Yet one detail remained deeply personal: the eyes.
Kramarik said she worked to capture their particular shades of green because of the peace she associated with them. She wanted that feeling to reach the person standing before the canvas.
The child who struggled to explain her experiences had found a way to communicate through paint. And she said that purpose continues through her work today.
“Every single piece that I do always points to God.”
James Lasher, a seasoned writer and editor at Charisma Media, combines faith and storytelling with a journalism background from Otterbein University and ministry experience in Guatemala and at the LA Dream Center. A Marine Corps and Air Force veteran, he is the author of The Revelation of Jesus: A Common Man’s Commentary and a contributor to Charisma magazine. For interviews and media inquiries, please contact [email protected].
