Super Humans - Akiane

   Akiane Kramarik (/əˈkiːənə/; born on July 9, 1994), referred to mononymously as Akiane, is an American poet and artist. She was known as a child prodigy for making a concrete image of Jesus and had begun drawing at the age of four. Kramarik's best-known painting is Prince of Peace, which was completed at the age of eight. Akiane Kramarik was born on July 9, 1994, in Mount Morris, Illinois to a Lithuanian mother and an American father. Her education began at a public school but she was later homeschooled. She is a self-taught painter. She states that God spoke to her when she was four years old, encouraging her to draw and paint her visions. Her parents were atheists at the time (they later converted to Christianity because of Kramarik's paintings and visions). She began to draw at the age of four, advanced to painting at six, and began to write poetry at seven. Her first completed self-portrait sold for US$10,000. Kramarik donates a portion of the revenue from art sales to charities. Her paintings are often allegorical as well as spiritual, involving likenesses of Jesus, children, and animals, as well as self-portraits. She often draws inspiration from magazine pictures. However, according to Kramarik, her main inspiration comes from her visions of heaven and her personal connection with God. At the age of 10, she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show; at the age of 12, on CNN. Additional appearances include The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (Episode: 1x68, April 25, 2005) and The Katie Couric Show (Episode: 1x21, October 8, 2012). By age 12, she had completed sixty large paintings. Some of her works have been purchased by the US Embassy in Singapore. Overall, she has completed over 200 artworks and 800 literary works and has published two best-selling books. In the spring of 2003, Akiane painted her first portrait of Jesus, entitled Prince of Peace. John Roth, a carpenter from Sandpoint, Idaho, was asked by Akiane to model for the painting representing Jesus. Colton Burpo, a near-death survivor at age four, had been identifying deceased family members from photographs, and the family had been searching for images that matched the boy's description of Jesus. It was not until Kramarik's Prince of Peace, a portrait of Jesus, was shown many years later on Glenn Beck's The Blaze, that Burpo confirmed that "they finally got one right." Burpo's story is told in the New York Times number-one, best-selling book, Heaven Is for Real (2010) and the identically titled film (2014). Kramarik is referenced in the film as the "young Lithuanian girl" and is shown with her painting at the beginning and the end of the movie.

Super Humans - Bada Shanren

Bada Shanren (born Zhu Da ca. 1626—1705) was a Han Chinese painter of ink wash painting and a calligrapher. He was of noble lineage, being a descendant of the Ming dynasty prince Zhu Quan. Art historians have named him as a leading painter of the period. Bada Shanren, a purported child prodigy, began painting and writing poetry in his early childhood. About the year 1644, when the Ming emperor committed suicide and the Manchu army from the north attacked Beijing, the young Han Chinese man sought refuge in a vihara. Because he was a Ming prince, the dynastic upheaval created a great amount of uncertainty for his position in society. As years passed and the Qing dynasty became more firmly established, there was less and less insecurity among the Qing regime about remaining Ming loyalties and possible future rebellions. Due to these more stable circumstances, after 40 years, Bada Shanren deemed it acceptable to leave the monastery and to re-enter day-to-day life among society. In the aftermath of a nervous breakdown that could have been staged to avoid retribution for his family background, Zhu Da abandoned his monastic life and developed a career as a professional painter, adopting a series of descriptive pseudonyms, most notably Bada Shanren by which he is most often known today. Bada Shanren is believed to have a mental illness. He is said to have screamed and made weird sounds while painting. The stylized vertical writing of his pseudonym Bada Shanren (八大山人) looks like the characters for laugh (笑) and cry (哭), thus by signing his paintings he implied his confusion and feelings of grief for the fate of his country and home.

His paintings feature sharp brush strokes which are attributed to the sideways manner by which he held his brush. In the 1930s, Chinese painter Zhang Daqian produced several forgeries of Bada Shanren's works but they are easily spotted by the trained eye, because the modern copies were softer and rounder. Yale University scholar Fred Fangyu Wang was a major collector of Bada Shanren paintings from the 1960s until his death in 1997.

Super Humans - Edmund Thomas Clint

Edmund Thomas Clint (1976–1983) was an Indian child prodigy known for having drawn over 30,000 paintings during his short life of seven years. Clint was the lone son of M.T. Joseph and Chinnamma Joseph. He was named after actor and director Clint Eastwood. He loved painting Hindu festivals and traditional events near his home in Kochi, Kerala. When he died of kidney failure in 1983, he was just six years and 11 months old, yet left behind some 20,000 artworks. Normally it would take years of analytical study and training to draw such paintings. His work has been displayed in exhibitions in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala in 1995 and 2007. At the age of 5, he secured first place in a competition held for painters below the age 18.