Painter or
drawer mediums are people who "paint or draw under the influence
of the spirits" (1). They are
rarer than other notable kinds of mediumship (as psychography, for
example), however, their artistic works can be impressive, mainly
if they paint or draw under very particular circumstances. We already
presented here the mediumship of Luiz Antônio Gasparetto,
however, other Brazilian mediums followed him and are presently
active. An interesting case is Florêncio Anton (2).
Florencio Anton was born in November 1973 in the city of Salvador
(Bahia). Since his first childhood, he was in contact with spirits.
One of this entities used to warn him on his misdoings and helped
him as a family guide. When he was 14 he was initiated to Spiritism
after a battle to understand the many phenomena that took place
at his presence. He looked for answers to clairvoyance, out of the
body experiences, physical effects and other occurrences he was
associated with, since they always happened around him. At the time,
he participated in many activities of GFLM (Grupo da Fraternidade
Leopoldo Machado) and was in contact with the thoughts of Allan
Kardec, Leon Denis, Emmanuel and many other spiritist authors.
His psychic gifts quickly arose at special seances of psychography,
psychophony and clairvoyance. His first artistic manifestation occurred
on December 21 1990 and was conducted by Manoel M. Canuto Oliveira,
a civil engineer and expert in psychic phenomena. At night, the
spirits invited him to concentrate and pray before several posters
and pencils, which were used to produced good quality sketches.
However, in the normal state, Florencio never shown any ability
to draw. His mediumship then improved considerably and is today
entirely dedicated to painting. His public demonstrations include
special ‘painting seances’ performed not only in Brazil,
but in many other countries such as Belgium, France, England, Italy,
Spain, Germany and others. He often paints with closed eyes and,
depending on the picture size, theme and author, Florencio finished
a painting between 3 to 20 minutes. He also already painted using
his feet, in darkness, with two hands at the same time and two canvas
at inverted positions. More than 30000 paintings were produced by
him since 1990 under the control of more than 110 disembodied authors
of distinct nationalities.
The social
purpose of Anton’s works
Florencio Anton supports charitable works at the city of Salvador
using the income generated by the paintings. Grupo Espírita
Scheilla (GES) is the spiritist foundation started by Florencio
in 1999 (together with Sidney Rocha and Ana M. Lima) hosting a variety
of pedagogical and psychological free services to help poor families
and children of Salvador. Being a spiritist institution, GES manages
Comunidade Maria de Nazaré (CMAN or Mary of Nazareth
Community) whose site may be reached at (4).
As remarked in (2), "it should
be mentioned that Florencio support himself solely by his job as
a teacher and Regression Therapist since he, as a spiritualist,
is not able to use the money generated through the sale of the paintings
for his own use." As a matter of fact, as a spiritist, he is
not allowed to use the income generated by the paintings to himself,
otherwise, spirits would quickly abandon him. His gift is dependent
upon the good use he makes of it.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Franklin Santana Santos for sending me some
references about Florencio Antono works.
Gallery
This one is from
my private collection...
More painting reproductions can be
seen at (5).
