The Anointing, 2002 Oil and Mixed Media Found Objects on Canvas Stacy Stewart Smith

The Anointing is not simply a self-portrait. It is a consecration.

Painted in 2002 and exhibited at the Stacy Stewart Smith Gallery in Brooklyn as part of the landmark Revelations in Red series, this intimate yet commanding work — 21.5" × 27" on canvas, housed in a bold ornate frame that gives it the gravity of antiquity — marks the moment Smith answered a divine call to ministry. It is one of only two works from that exhibition still available for collection.

The subject is the artist himself, in his late thirties, long hair in twists, draped in a hooded garment that carries the weight of centuries. The hood reads simultaneously as the chain mail of a medieval knight and the urban hoodie of the inner city — protective, purposeful, worn by those who move through the world knowing it is not always safe. Smith renders it in an oil-and-wax medium, built up with a palette knife over months, then finished with pure daubs of chroma primaries and secondaries that make the fabric appear to glow from within. Glazes of Rose Madder over Cadmium Red deepen the luminosity, giving the figure an outer radiance that is less painterly effect than spiritual fact.

Across the surface, collage fragments — images of family, personal events, printed words — are scattered at deliberate random, inviting the viewer to complete meanings the artist has left open. Embedded among them: a gold-plated crucifix and rhinestone tie pins, found objects that transform the canvas into something closer to a reliquary than a painting. These are not decorations. They are offerings.

The Anointing is where Abstractrealism was born — where Smith first understood that paintings could exist on top of paintings, within paintings, and that the space between the real and the imagined was not a gap to be closed but a threshold to be inhabited.

Oil and Mixed Media / Found Objects on Canvas · 21.5" × 27" (framed: 28.5" × 34.5") · 2002
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