NEW GLOUCESTER – Joe Lepore believes he can see Jesus in the mottled paint of his guitar.

The sighting first happened about a month ago, after he painted and sanded the mahogany and maple he bought at Lowe’s to make an electric guitar. When he was done giving it a distressed look, Lepore said he noticed the profile of a bearded man’s head near the tuning pegs.

“I saw that guy up top first,” Lepore said. “I was just sitting there looking at it one day. ‘Hey, there’s a guy there.’ Then the dog popped out at me,” he said Tuesday. Other images, he said, made themselves clearer: a sheep and a lion.

“I turn it over and it looks like Jesus standing there with his arms open.”

He insists he did nothing to create the pictures.

Lepore, who says he’s homeless and sleeps in his Jeep in a friend’s driveway, wants to build guitars for a living. Right now, the Massachusetts man is using that same friend’s New Gloucester basement as a workshop.

He said he isn’t trying to make any money off this guitar. He did, though, have it on eBay before he spotted the figure with arms.

“All these pictures – I feel like I need to share it with the world,” Lepore said. “Whatever it means, I don’t know. I don’t want wackos praying over it.”

His friend, Maureen Glaskin, said she thinks it’s God’s way of telling Lepore to keep making guitars.

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