Art

...In his fastidiously tidy studio at Twomey Hospital hang a few of the old oil paintings...

...But he was going, mostly, to have both his legs amputated...

...Now Maya has found another medium...

...Now the manner becomes the man...

...The underwater scenes 26: 27 March 1992 Commonweal show waving, soft coral and fish that are sharply angular, even cubist...

...While he is patient with his visitor, retelling the story of his life, when I ask about taking his picture he says sardonically, "don't expect me to stand up...

...The affliction that keeps Twomey Hospital's twenty-two patients isolated seems, at once, as medieval as the plague and as modern as the AIDS ward...

...Twomey Hospital, an institution for those afflicted with leprosy—and I set out to meet him...

...All I knew then was that I had stumbled upon someone who, in the confined space of a twelve-by-eighteeninch piece of paper, could evoke the impenetrable tropical jungle in bold, slashing strokes with a palette of greens—someone who could paint in a way that made me momentarily forget that anyone had ever painted a jungle before...

...It is not a good life," he says...

...Now the illness is called Hansen's disease, a name that carries no moral baggage, and the residents at Twomey are there not Commonweal 27 March 1992: 25 because they are obliged to be but because they have no place to go...

...For more than half a century, Semisi Maya has been wasting away from Hansen's disease—leprosy—which has kept him essentially confined and denied him the full use of the most taken-for-granted tools of the artist, his hands...

...His purple and orange sunsets have the brilliance of American Luminist paintings...

...He works steadily, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon...

...A dozen or so crowd around, children as well as old men, marked by purple blotches and disfiguring scars and wrecked bodies reminiscent of the rages of Kaposi's sarcoma...

...They brought books that showed Maya how other artists had overcome physical debilities, had worked with brushes held in their teeth or clenched in their toes...

...Some have surrendered their hands or arms or legs to the disease...

...I was a fisherman," Maya reminds me, "and I love the sea...

...Historically, leprosy was a contagion of metaphor, a source of panic as much as an illness...

...A decade ago, several of his paintings had been made into postage stamps and others have graced the cover of the local phone book...

...They walk gingerly, for the affliction destroys the nerves, gradually causing paralysis in many who are afflicted...

...He has to rely on memory and photographic reminders to "think my way back to the place...

...His first paintings, he remembers, were "just noise" and there was no teacher to help, just the enthusiasm of the nuns...

...Hibiscus declare themselves with a delicacy that allows the dewdrop to drip slowly from the petal...

...How can I paint...

...What I would learn about the man during my search to meet him in person made his work seem even more singular...

...But I am not so interested in oils any more," he tells me...

...It is a painful life...

...What Maya has done transforms a way of making art that has been the province of enthusiastic six-year-olds...

...The sisters say, 'think about your art, don't think about the pain.' But I can't go where I want to go, and when I am angry, I cannot work...

...He was first sent away to Makogai, a remote island which at the time served as Fiji's leprosarium, for fourteen years...

...The hospital, a clearing in the trees, looks as benign as an elementary school, all green concrete and covered walks, though there are incessant warnings about cleanliness and separate facilities for "ladies" and "gentlemen...

...There was more of Maya's work stored in the back rooms of the hotel, as original in its vision as that jungle scene...

...Painting has never been a Fijian tradition, and what's on view is derivative of the worst of over-the-couch art...

...Commonweal 27 March 1992: 27...

...But finding the man was harder...

...After several false starts, the helpful Visitors' Bureau located his address—P.J...

...His work had received international notice, including a show at London's Bond Street Gallery, and now he was going abroad to see his paintings hung in a New Zealand exhibition...

...He will turn out as many as a dozen paintings in a single day, hundreds each year, thousands over the decades since the sisters put a brush between his wrists, a record of a place whose surpassing beauty has never been captured in painted images...

...But the development of successful regimes of treatment has made it seem less fearsome, as has a gradual popular understanding that it is spread only by prolonged skin-to-skin contact...

...Then he returned to his village, but the crippling effects of the disease forced him back to the hospital...

...It has become much harder to hold the brush...

...Those tableaux are softened as through the gaze of a diver's eyes, lighted as if by the pale rays of an end-of-the-day sun shining through the water...

...Maya sells his paintings for a pittance, $20 or $25 apiece, the price varying with the size, and he uses the money mostly for paint and paper...

...Gradually, though, Maya was able to recall on canvas moments from his childhood or draw on his Methodist upbringing to place biblical figures in the fields and jungles of Fiji—the Madonna, or Joseph the carpenter wearing the man's traditional skirt...

...The tradition of craft, never as rich as in other corners of the South Pacific, has almost died out, and the hand-carved cannibal bowls that tourists bring home today are mostly made in the Philippines...

...Other patients come by to watch him paint but none has taken him up on his offer to teach them how...

...By clasping his wrists together, Semisi Maya could barely hold a brush...

...In I982, Maya left Fiji for the first time...

...That jungle scene I first saw, like scores of other works kept in the studio for the occasional visitor, are finger-paintings...

...Only patients, no nurses or doctors, are on hand when I arrive...

...To get there, you leave the city miles behind and then, after passing a juvenile detention center surrounded by barbed wire, you turn down a rutted road to an out-of-sight building...

...No one stumbles upon Twomey Hospital accidentally...

...Some of those paintings eventually find their way into otherwise forgettable hotel lobbies, where they lie wait to prize open the eyes of a passing stranger...

...In 1938, when he was a young fisherman living in the village of Cautata some twenty miles north of Suva, Semisi Maya contracted leprosy...

...Not that he is unknown in his native land...

...Perhaps it was my manner," he says, "the way I described things...

...he asked the sisters, pointing at his wasted hands...

...Gradually his body weakened until, by the time he was forty, his fingers could hardly hold even the lightest object...

...But Maya hasn't seen the sea for years, or flowers, or even sunsets...

...Semisi Maya's work is as remarkable as an eclipse...

...He spreads the paint with the side of his forearm, then uses not just his fingers and palms but all the parts of his hands that he can manipulate, knuckles and the back of his wrist, the edge of his hand, and even the hair on his arms, to produce his effects, adding finishing details with a rubber-tipped spatula that he holds between his matchstick wrists...

...That was when the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary who, then as now, run the leprosarium, proposed to the startled patient that he take up painting...

...Painting was to be a counterweight to Maya's bouts of depression...

...The nuns tell the story differently...

...Fiji is barren ground for art...

...DAVID L. KIRP David L. Kirp is professor of public policy at the University of California (Berkeley...

...ART SINGULAR BRUSH STROKES THE ART OF SEMISI MAYA he story begins with a single remarkable painting by an artist name Semisi Maya, improbably hanging in the otherwise forgettable lobby of the Travelodge Hotel in Suva, steamy capital of Fiji...

...Too much work," they say...

...But even as his painting got better the degenerative effects of the disease grew worse...

...These days, Semisi Maya paints every Tuesday, when a former patient comes to help him mix his paints and soak the paper...