D.C. Painter Merged His Grieving Spirit With Artistic Vision

Just before Christmas 1993, alone and sick with grief at the loss of so many friends to AIDS, Wesley Maxwell Lawton had what he later called "a waking dream, like a vision."

"I saw myself sitting on a hospital examination table, naked and hooked up to oxygen and IV drips. Suddenly, the image changed. It was no longer me sitting there, but Christ, covered in AIDS cancer lesions with his head bowed, nude, wearing only a crown of thorns. I knew I had to paint it."

The artist, son of a Baptist minister, reflected on the Old Testament words of Isaiah 53:3-4:

"He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted."

As Lawton painted the first version of "Man of Sorrows: Christ With AIDS," he remembered the many previous paintings of a suffering Christ over the centuries, including a famous portrait of Jesus as a victim of the bubonic plague.

"This gave me the merit to continue. I also knew I had to answer the fundamentalists who were saying AIDS was God's judgment on gay people and drug users," Lawton wrote on his Web site, http://www.maxwelllawton.com .

Lawton, 50, who died of metastatic malignant melanoma Sept. 16 at the Washington Home, was working toward a master's degree at Wesley Theological Seminary when he exhibited the painting at the seminary's gallery in 1994. A priest, sent from Cape Town, South Africa, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to research AIDS ministries, saw the work. Several months later, Tutu and his new ministry, Wola Nani-Embrace, invited Lawton to Cape Town to paint a version for the city's St. George's Cathedral.

He worked publicly in the back of the church, creating a 3 1/2 -by-5-foot work that he had visualized months earlier. In the background, Jesus's words from Matthew 25:40 are quoted in Xhosa, Afrikaans and English, the three languages of Cape Town:

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.' "

Visitors who stopped by were divided on the project, some of them supportive, others accusing him of blasphemy. When the image appeared on the front page of the Cape Times, threats of violence forced him into hiding for several weeks. Tutu and the cathedral defended Lawton and his work, and the uproar received worldwide attention. Photos of the painting appeared around the globe. Almost a dozen years later, it has been seen by more than 10 million people. It was shown at the World Council of Churches, and it has appeared on the covers of Christian magazines, papers, periodicals, Web sites and a book.

"It really did heal people," said Edward Grieff, Lawton's partner of 11 years. "There was one woman who was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pants because she had lesions. She wore shorts for the first time because she said if it was okay for Jesus to have AIDS, it was okay for her."

Lawton, whose family tree was filled with ministers and missionaries of several faiths, finished his master's degree in theological studies in 1996. He painted many other sacred and provocative topics: the healer Archangel Raphael for Miami's Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, an African Madonna entangled in oxygen and intravenous tubes, St. Sebastian bedeviled by hypodermic needles instead of arrows, and Lazarus as a self-portrait.

He also painted a tribute to the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, who died Sept. 11, 2001, in a field near Shanksville, Pa. He painted land- and seascapes in Hawaii and bold, colorful bowls of fruit and medications, which he called "Our Daily Bread."

Outgoing, playful and flirtatious, he was simultaneously prayerful and deeply serious about both faith and art, said a friend, the Rev. Jerry Anderson. Lawton prayed over his meals and his medications, convinced that his prayers helped his pills work better.

"With Max, you always went to a deeper level," said Anderson, an Episcopal priest who co-founded the Episcopal Caring Response for AIDS in the Washington diocese. "He was a trickster in the archetypal sense. He played with people; he was a throwback to the old Southern genteel charmer. He would draw you in, then he would shock you with his art."