Old Fashion Baptism II

A coral parasol, an orange one, a yellow one, all lifted above the crowd like blossoms opening. A woman in fuchsia. A girl in teal. The white clapboard church rising behind them against a sky washed in rose and cream. Ted Ellis painted Old Fashion Baptism II with a looser, bolder hand than usual, and the result feels the way memory actually works: the colors stay vivid long after the details go soft. 

The congregation stands in a line along the bank in their Sunday best. A man in a cream suit leans on his cane with a child beside him. A deacon holds an open book. A woman in a wide brimmed white hat waits with her hands folded. Down in the shallow water, the figures in white are gathered close around the candidate, heads wrapped in white cloth, the water catching warm streaks of orange light. 

The ritual in this painting followed a form that country congregations across the South knew by heart. Baptisms were often held once a year at the close of a summer revival, after those seeking salvation had come forward to the mourner's bench. Before the service, deacons went ahead to the creek to prepare it, beating through the water with sticks to clear out snakes and cutting back the brush along the bank. Some drove stakes to mark safe depth. On the day itself, deacons led the devotional with hymns, scripture, and prayer, then walked the candidates into the water while the congregation sang from the bank.

The white head covering worn by the newly baptized was part of the form. In many churches, it stayed on after the walk back up the hill, and it came off only after the pastor, then the deacons, and finally the whole congregation had shaken the new member's hand. The cloth marked someone in between, no longer who they were, not yet fully received. The handshake finished what the water started.

Ted Ellis trained as a chemist, not a painter. He earned a chemistry degree from Dillard University on an Army ROTC scholarship, served as a second lieutenant in the field artillery, and spent roughly a decade in the sciences, painting nights and weekends out of a studio in his garage. Self-taught, he developed a style he describes as blending realism and impressionism, and he sums up his method simply: he aims to capture the essence in a single stroke. That instinct shows plainly here in the broad, confident handling of the church and the figures. Ellis counts Henry Ossawa Tanner, Edward Bannister, and Jacob Lawrence among his favorite painters, and in 1998 he beat out roughly 500 other artists for a Walt Disney Studios commission honoring Black History Month, later displayed at Epcot. In 2002 he took the Palette Award for impressionism at the Heritage Arts Festival.