The Color of Belief
In a city where logic reigns supreme, what happens when art becomes a battleground for the soul?
Written by Jon Stojan
A mural. That’s how it begins. Not with thunder or prophecy, but with a brushstroke, thick, blood-toned, layered onto a museum wall. The artist stands alone, surrounded by scaffolding and skulls of extinct beasts, painting early man in vivid hues. His hand is steady. His heart, less so.
In The Color of Miracles, the novel by Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author Keith Merrill, the tension isn’t just between characters but between ideas. Set in a modern San Francisco where evolution, art, and faith intersect in unexpected ways, the book invites readers into the quiet crisis of a man asked to create not just an image, but meaning itself. What unfolds is part philosophical reckoning, part spiritual search, rendered with the painterly eye of a writer who sees the world in brushstrokes.
The Brush Meets the Battlefield
At its surface, The Color of Miracles is a contemporary literary drama about an artist wrestling with two very different commissions. One grounded in Darwinian science, the other in ancient scripture. But the novel’s true heart lies in its interrogation of belief: not simply what we believe, but why, and what happens when that belief is challenged not by argument, but by beauty, by story, by pain.Thomas Hall, the central figure in Merrill’s story, is a fantasy artist known for breathing life into myth and color into memory. His gift is imagination; his curse is detachment. When asked to paint a mural depicting Jesus’s miracles for a children’s hospital, Thomas finds himself on unfamiliar terrain. Not because he lacks talent but because he lacks conviction.
He can paint anything but he doesn’t know what he believes about the thing he’s painting.This line, like so many in Merrill’s narrative, sits on the page like a lit fuse.
The Maker Behind the Story
To understand this book, one might do well to consider its author. Keith Merrill is not your typical debut novelist. A filmmaker by trade and an artist in spirit, Merrill has spent a lifetime shaping stories for screen and stage, winning an Academy Award for his documentary The Great American Cowboy. Raised in the open stretches of Farmington, Utah, he carries with him a deep reverence for family, faith, and the power of personal legacy.The Color of Miracles is, in many ways, Merrill’s most personal work. While it draws on themes of art, science, and religion, it never preaches. Instead, it listens, offering readers the space to wonder, to resist, and perhaps even to soften. That tone is no accident.
Color as a Question
One of the novel’s quiet achievements is how it redefines what a miracle looks like. In Merrill’s hands, it’s not thunder and lightning, but a gesture, a decision, a moment of grace in a world that prizes proof. Thomas Hall, skeptical and brilliant, finds himself not in theological debates, but in moral ones. He draws, and redraws, trying to find a visual language for things he’s never believed in.The San Francisco of The Color of Miracles is no postcard. It is textured, contradictory, a city of pavilions and cathedrals, of street musicians and lecture halls. Against this backdrop, the artist’s internal debate becomes an external one. Museum curators, hospital board members, strangers with quiet wisdom. They all become voices in a dialogue that resists conclusion.
You don’t have to believe in miracles. You just have to paint like you’ve seen one.
An Invitation, Not an Answer
In the end, The Color of Miracles does what all lasting art must do: it haunts a little. It lingers in questions rather than answers, tones rather than declarations. It asks readers not to agree, but to look again, to consider that something beautiful might also be true, and that truth might sometimes look like doubt.Merrill leaves us with no dogma, only a doorway. And standing just inside is a muralist, paintbrush in hand, eyes narrowed, not because he sees clearly, but because he’s finally learning to look.
What if the miracle isn’t what happens? What if it’s simply the fact that we’re still willing to ask?
Discover the full story in The Color of Miracles by Keith Merrill, available on Amazon.
