Practicing the Healing Art-- With a Brush

Dressed in grayish-green surgeon’s garb, the stocky man with the iron-grip handshake intensely pushed a gurney down a North Hollywood hospital’s carpeted hallway.

An observer would have to look twice to realize something was wrong. The guy was a mess. Scores of blue, green, white and yellow smudges covered his clothes and hands. The gurney was filled with dozens of little containers of acrylic paint.

Yet John Feight went about his business as methodically as the most messianic surgeon.

‘Healing Power of Art’

His mission: “The healing power of art. Proving that art can be medicine. I want to prove that.”

For 11 years, Feight, an Atlanta man in his mid-40s, has been obsessed with painting murals on the sterile walls of hospitals, trying to temper the institutions’ loneliness, anxiety and fear. He began doing it on weekends and on vacations from his job as an advertising executive. Last year he finally quit his job to devote himself full time to painting.

He works long, furiously paced hours, living out of hospital rooms to give himself more time and empathy. “I just become part of the staff,” he said.

Feight estimates that he has painted about 2,000 hospital murals throughout the country and abroad, sometimes receiving money for his supplies, sometimes doing it for free. Last week he painted more than two dozen murals at Rancho Encino Hospital in Encino in three days. This week he added 15 or so to the Medical Center of North Hollywood.

“I’m not sure how many there are,” one North Hollywood hospital official said. “Every time I turn around there are two or three more up.”

The subjects tend to colorful jungles, with zebras and giraffes predominant, and to landscapes and seascapes. But it is where the murals appear, and the reason that Feight devotes himself to them, that distinguishes his art.

For example, the patients wheeled into the operating room at the North Hollywood hospital look up at a mural on the ceiling. The cancer patients who lie under the cold machinery of the radiation room face a wall graced by a large blue horizontal sunrise over a lake. If they walk close to it, they see an inscription that Feight wrote above his signature: “Live your dreams.”

A wall in the intensive care unit is dominated by a heart-shaped tree of small red and orange hearts. Patients and staff members are encouraged to sign their names inside the hearts.

As Feight works, he relishes offering a brush to anyone who passes by, asking them to help. He gleefully attacks corners, lobbies and other niches where a painted wall is pleasantly jarring.

‘Makes a Nice Feeling’

Joanne Reed, administrator of the North Hollywood hospital, said she had given Feight carte blanche. “It adds warmth and makes a statement about caring,” she said.

“It makes a nice feeling,” said 74-year-old Pascio Olivo of North Hollywood, a patient in the intensive care unit.

Feight said his interest began churning in the early 1970s when a friend died of cancer. Later, he found himself in Paris, wondering about life in the world of advertising.

He had taken up painting and did a series that he planned to sell to raise money for a hospital. Nobody bought his work, though, so he decided he would do paintings at an Atlanta mental hospital and donate the art. He did the work inside the hospital, yet still he felt unfulfilled.

“And then one day I looked up and there was a wall,” he said. “And I haven’t been the same since.”

He worked with painstaking slowness on his first wall mural, he said. Then a 5-year-old girl who had been badly burned in a car explosion moved up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder and asked if she could help.

“I turned around and gave her a paintbrush. And that’s when I gave up on my ‘art’ and finally realized people are precious--not ‘art.’ I’ve been running around for a long time trying to tear down ‘art.’ ”

His Spiritual Foundation

Feight quotes liberally from the book “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” which he regards as a spiritual foundation, and says he is driven to paint as many murals as physically possible “because I really believe love comes from love. After people see the first mural, they start asking for others.”

His work at the Encino and North Hollywood hospitals is being underwritten by American Medical International Inc., an international hospital chain that owns the hospitals and hopes to retain Feight to do similar work at many other places.

Removal of Pressure

The relationship will take away much of the pressure of trying to persuade hospital administrators to let him paint on their walls, Feight said.

“They worry about it chipping or being damaged. I tell them, ‘Let it be up one day, and it’ll help someone.’ ”

Sitting in his hospital room, Feight jabbed a thin paintbrush against a white paint-streaked palm.

“Hospitals should not be sterile, cold, hard places. . . . I am mad at the idea that when people get cancer, they are abandoned or die in sterile places.”

It was around 1 in the morning earlier this week when Feight was putting the finishing touches on the tree of hearts in the North Hollywood hospital’s intensive care unit. The family of a woman who was dying of cancer and a stroke emerged from her room and asked Feight if he could add a heart for the patient.

Feight did more than that. The tree of hearts now contains in its center a larger purple heart in the woman’s memory.