The Artist Merisi

Merisi is a painter of Christ-centred sacred art: the Passion, sorrowing figures, saints and scenes from Scripture, painted with the drama, realism and devotion of the Baroque. The name comes from Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who painted saints as real people in hard, raking light, and that inheritance runs through every work.

Merisi paints by candlelight on gessoed wooden panels, in oils made from pigment and linseed oil. Each painting begins as a grisaille, a painting in greys that settles the drawing and the fall of light, and is built up in thin glazes of colour, each left to dry before the next, until the shadows deepen and the light seems to come from within.

Merisi leaves paintings in churches, unannounced, each showing the church's own patron saint, with a wax seal on the back and a handwritten note offering it as a gift. Every painting hides a message in plain sight, and its Latin title is the key. Churches may also ask for a painting, free of charge: altarpieces, Stations of the Cross, the patron saint of a parish.

Merisi never charges for a painting. A gift is not his to sell. For God, Not for Greed™.

Seen only from behind, in a brown fedora at the altar.

Studies in Florence, Italy. Predominantly self-taught.