The Definition of A Miracle is:

An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature

and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God

This extraordinary image you see above, is a face that miraculously appeared on a canvas. It was not painted with intention by human hands. How could this happen? Why did it happen? Is it here to help? Is This Face an Image of Jesus?

HOW THE IMAGE HAPPENED

On March 9, 2006, Trish, a grandmother in her 60's, witnessed this miracle. Trish had taken up a new hobby and began painting one month prior to this with art supplies purchased at a garage sale. She prepared her 16 by 20 inch canvas to paint a landscape. She didn't have enough white, so she mixed white with gold and brown and added a touch of paint thinner. She applied the mixture of oil paint to the canvas with horizontal brush strokes using a one inch wide brush. It took about 3 minutes. When she returned to the room with a cup of coffee a few minutes later, she was astonished to find an image on her canvas. She hadn't painted it, but there it was. Seeking a logical explanation for this phenomena, Trish soon brought the canvas to a School of Fine Art which specializes in fine art portraiture.

A SCHOOL OF FINE ART EXAMINES THE PORTRAIT

THE COMPLETE REVIEW

Director of the Minnesota School of Fine Art: Patricia Jerde

Wednesday, April 5^th, 2006

Dear Trisha,

Thank you for bringing your remarkable painting to our school this morning for us to see. There are definitely things about it that seem to be most unusual.

All my life I have been interested in portraiture. I spent so much time learning to capture the human face, starting at the age of 4. By the age of 16, after countless drawings, I was able to get a likeness. I didn't learn to paint portraits until my mid thirties, when I spent 5 years training at Atelier LeSueur, an art school teaching traditional methods of drawing and painting. For the last 15 years I have taught hundreds of people to draw and paint, specializing in portraits in pencil, charcoal and oil paint.

Your painting strikes me as extremely unusual for numerous reasons:

If you have as little training as you say, to produce an image so accurate to human proportions would be extremely rare. Most students trying their first portrait make the same mistakes, seriously underestimating the height of the top half of the head and only gradually learning that the eyes are usually halfway from top of head to chin. I found the proportions of the face in your painting are not only accurate, they are also right-on life size for an adult male.

Even for someone of considerable training, to create that image with the huge brush you used would be very difficult. Details, especially the mouth, would be very hard to do without using a much smaller, finer brush. I was somewhat skeptical until I saw the brush. I could see that it was possible to do the painting with that brush, but not to control the result. The result just “happened” with no apparent way of making it happen.
The short length of time it took you to do the painting would substantiate the lack of intention in it's outcome and possible to put that amount of paint on a canvas that size with that size brush in about three minutes, just “stroking it on”. In my opinion, to actually deliberately create such an image would take considerably longer, even if you had a great deal of artistic training.
The placement of the head upon the canvas is done so well...again unusual in someone with little or no training. Usually in a near profile the student places the face too close to the edge of the canvas, which makes the viewer uncomfortable, as if the subject might bump his nose if he takes a step forward. Also the usual placement is to put the head too far down on the canvas, centered evenly top and sides, creating a bit of a “”bulls-eye” look. The placement of the head here is just right, as if done by an artist with considerable training.
Other remarkable things: When we first talked you described it as a “profile” of a man. That would have been unusual enough given the above points. But it is actually a ¾ extreme angle view, allowing the viewer to see the other side of the face. The mouth in that angle, showing just a little bit of the other side of the upper lip is a tricky bit of painting when you're deliberately trying to do it.. to do it unintentionally defies belief. And with that brush? Amazing. The eyes and mouth both appear to be an accurate angle from such a view, another difficult feat. Another unusual thing is the expression changing when viewed from different angles. When viewed from the right the man in the image looks sad, distressed. When viewed from the far left the man looks peaceful and contented. The eyes also appear to be open, closed or partially open when viewed from different angles.

Like many of the world's paintings by the great masters, features are suggested rather than painted with much detail in one of Belasquez's greatest portraits the viewer sees detail that is simply not there upon closer examination the amateur painter usually makes the mistake of putting in much more detail than is necessary.

Close-up inspection with a magnifying glass revealed a very interesting pattern of repetitive brush strokes not easily visible. The brush strokes may explain the interesting “moire” pattern resembling ripples in water that appear in some of the digital photographs taken of the painting. (One of our artists is going to check with National Camera to get an explanation for this unusual effect).

When seen with light coming through the back of the canvas, many in the group saw what appeared to be tears streaming down the cheek. Some saw what appeared to be a mushroom cloud in the lower left corner. We also saw a tiny but very distinct “07” near the lower left corner and could not explain its presence. Looking through the canvas from the back side when brightly lit from the front did not reveal any image underneath the paint that could have emerged.

In conclusion: I cannot explain how this image could appear in a painting created so quickly, and with no attempted control, and with such a large brush. For such a thing to occur in a subliminal way by an untrained artist in my opinion would be extremely unusual, if not miraculous. I cannot explain it with anything I know or have experienced.

Patricia Jerde

Director & Founder

Minnesota River School of Fine Art