“You’re obviously gifted. Where does this come from?” Oprah asked Akiane.

“It comes from God,” the young prodigy replied confidently.

In an interview with a 10-year-old Akiane, she was asked how she knows that it’s God speaking to her. She replied, “Because I can hear His voice. His voice is quiet and beautiful.”

Curiously, Akiane’s family is not religious, and the concept of God was never discussed in the small town Idaho home, where she grew up.

“It wasn’t just art that was happening. Simultaneous with art was a spiritual awakening,” said Akiane’s mother, Forelli Kramarik, who grew up in an atheistic family from Lithuania. “It all began to happen when she started to share her dreams and visions. And my husband was a former Catholic and did not share in the family beliefs. We didn’t pray together, there was no discussion about God, and we didn’t go to church. Then all of a sudden, Akiane was starting to talk about God.”

Akiane, who was home schooled, had no babysitters or a television, was not influenced by anyone outside the home, her mom said. “We were with the kids all the time, and so these words from Akiane about God didn’t come from the outside–we knew that. But there suddenly were intense conversations about God’s love, His place [in our lives], and she would describe everything in detail.”

Akiane explained the portrait was inspired by a vision that she had since she was a preschooler. She said that she would illustrate her visions through poetry and other writings but then it was too “complex to describe through words so I painted.”

She said, “I always think about Jesus and talk about Him.  I was looking for a [Jesus] model for a long, long time, and when I couldn’t find anyone, one day I suggested to my family to pray all day for this model so God would send the right one.”

The family prayed and a very tall carpenter–like Jesus, who was also a carpenter–appeared at the family’s door, looking for work. Akiane recalled that she nearly fainted when she saw him. “I told my mother that that was him. I want him to be my model,” she recalls.