Synopsis/Details
Arizona, 1932. The day 17-year old Anas Johnson buries her mother in a dust-choked ranch cemetery, she picks up a watercolor set and cannot stop painting. She doesn't know why.
The images arriving in her head are not landscapes or portraits — they are first-person visions of Jesus Christ's life through his eyes. Her stepfather wants her married to her step-brother, Stephen, and stop painting.
Her 14- year old younger sister Susan covers household chores for her as AJ attacks canvas after canvas with a brush made from a horse's tail.
A young preacher named Joshua Emmanuel rides in out of nowhere, drawn by a rainbow that has been burning in the night sky for days without explanation, and tells AJ what she already suspects and cannot accept — that she has been chosen for something that will cost her everything and benefit everyone else.
When Susan’s and Stephen’s father, Michael, stopped their mother from writing down these visions, God took her and the obligation was thrust upon AJ via painting.
The ranch is held together by a single hope: a prize mare carrying a foal that represents the family's last financial lifeline.
When the birth goes wrong and the barn catches fire, AJ burns her paintings to save the light the birth needs — and in the chaos that follows, loses the use of her painting hand. Susan, running in after her, loses her sight. When AJ decides to devote her life to the paintings, the constant rainbow we discover was her mother’s soul which is finally freed.
What God took from one sister, he left in the other. AJ can see. Susan can paint. Together they are exactly one artist — and together they finish what was started.
Ninety years and 12,000 canvases later, AJ passes as the Vatican confirms what the Johnson ranch always knew. Joshua, unchanged and unhurried, watches AJ’s spirit manifest into a horizon wide rainbow encircle the world.
