By Pavarotti (After Hicks) : Art: Some of the tenor’s ‘original’ paintings appear to have been copied from a book by Mary E. Hicks, an 87-year-old widow.

Luciano Pavarotti has reached the pinnacle of stardom as an opera singer, but in his heart of hearts he always wanted to be a painter. Or so he has told members of the press during an international tour of his artwork.

“When I was small, I didn’t dream of becoming an opera singer, I wanted to become a painter, a famous painter,” he confessed in a statement distributed last summer at an exhibition at the Meridian International Center in Washington.

“However, my dream was prohibited,” the statement says. “I had no aptitude for drawing, nor did I have any color sense. . . . I was hopeless at painting.”

When the frustrated boy became a man, his “secret passion” was finally satisfied. One fateful night--Oct. 12, 1978, to be exact--he was unable to sleep. Pavarotti had been seized by an “unexplainable mania” to paint, according to the statement.

“I felt mysterious sensations, the desire to start painting was irresistible; I felt I had to satisfy this at all costs,” the statement says. Conveniently, an admirer had given him a small canvas and a set of acrylics--perhaps in honor of his role as the painter Cavaradossi in “Tosca.” Pavarotti went to work, and nine hours later he had completed a landscape. “I felt like I had created the world. I was so moved I believe I cried. . . . That strange and curious experience changed by life. From that moment on I became victim of the mania for painting,” Pavarotti says in the statement.

Since that night, the singer has produced more than three dozen paintings, 22 of which have been reproduced and marketed as “original” silk-screen prints. But it turns out that there’s more to Pavarotti’s artworks than his widely reported epiphany. Three of the paintings are copies of European scenes in a how-to-draw book by Mary E. Hicks, an 87-year-old widow who is living on Social Security in La Veta, Colo.

Her book, “My Adventures in Europe,” was published in 1972 by Walter T. Foster as part of an instructional series of paperbacks, which are sold in art supply stores all around the world. Hicks, who lived in Southern California for about 50 years before moving to Colorado to be near her children, produced the book after she and her late husband, Milton Hicks, traveled to Europe in the ‘60s.

The couple enjoyed few luxuries during their long marriage. But after Milton retired from his gardening business and Mary gave up her job in an art supply store, they managed to take three trips to Europe. “My husband took beautiful photographs and I did lots of sketches because I saw wonderful things and I didn’t think I’d have a chance to pass that way again,” Hicks said in a telephone interview. “My Adventures in Europe” is one of three books that she produced for Walter Foster Publishing, Inc.

One of the paintings copied by Pavarotti, a street scene that he has titled “Parigi,” mimics Hicks’ painting of Strasbourg, right down to the shadows, flower boxes and contradictory perspective. Another work, “Casa Florita,” is a brightened-up facsimile of Hicks’ “Isola Bella,” depicting a shrine on an island in Lake Maggiore. In the book, Hicks notes that she borrowed a Madonna from a shrine in Verona for the painting because the figure in the Isola Bella shrine was badly faded; Pavarotti did likewise. And the singer’s “Venezia” replicates Hicks’ painting of a canal in Venice. As Hicks now points out, she mistakenly painted two nuns on a bridge as if they were outside a railing, and Pavarotti copied the error.

Pavarotti’s copies of Hicks’ work apparently represent a small percentage of his output, but he seems to have taken special pride in these paintings. “Parigi,” “Casa Florita” and “Venezia” are often reproduced in articles about his work. “His favorite subjects are landscapes, cityscapes, flowers and villages. But it was this painting of Venice that made him cry,” Connie Chung said of “Venezia” in a CBS interview at his exhibition in Washington.

Pavarotti explained his tears: “Because it was the first time I paint with shadow and when I finished, it was under a light, and I thought it was a real painting.”

“He’s made outrageous statements,” Hicks said. “The books were made to be copied, but I resent it when he says that these are his original paintings. I resent that he is making money from them too. If anyone gets any money from my paintings, it should be me.”

Pavarotti does not sell his paintings, but his silk-screen prints of the same subjects reportedly have been marketed for $2,200 to $2,500 apiece, or $25,000 for a complete set of 22 images. “If newspaper articles about his Washington exhibition are true, it sounds like Pavarotti made more money from his art in one night than Mom made in her entire career,” said Hicks’ daughter, Judy Welch, referring to accounts of a star-studded reception and sale of his prints.

According to her contract with Foster, Hicks was paid a 5-cent royalty for each copy of “My Adventures in Europe” that was sold. The price of the book was originally $2, and later raised to $2.95. Book royalties and money from occasional sales of her paintings were “very helpful,” Hicks said, but she was never able to make a living from her artwork. “Few artists do,” she noted.

Hicks isn’t looking for money from Pavarotti, however. Neither is she spoiling for a legal battle. If she has grounds for a legal complaint, apparently it would not be on the basis of copyright infringement. Hicks holds copyrights to her paintings but not to the book, and the publisher has no interest in pursuing Pavarotti. When Hicks notified the company of the singer’s use of her book, editor Sydney Sprague responded in a letter, “I (and we--Walter Foster Publishing) find nothing wrong with it--especially since the paintings he copied have been out of print for so long. Furthermore, I’m sure that Mr. Foster would have been proud that a man of Mr. Pavarotti’s stature has learned to paint from ‘his’ books.”

“This is an ethical issue,” Welch said, and her mother agrees.

“I wouldn’t even want an apology,” Hicks said. “I would just like recognition that his originals are my originals.”

Pavarotti, who last year admitted to lip-syncing at a concert in Italy, was unavailable for comment. His spokesman, New York attorney Elliot Hoffman, is impatient with questions about the Hicks affair. “I’m a very busy guy,” he said. “This is a non-story.”

Hoffman contends that his famous client has been completely candid about his sources and that the singer has publicly acknowledged his debt to Hicks’ book in print and television interviews. But the only acknowledgment by Pavarotti that has come to light is a four-inch article in Danish, which appeared in the Aug. 1, 1992, issue of Berlingske Tidende, a Copenhagen newspaper.

And thereby hangs a tale. Pavarotti during the last decade has exhibited his artwork in New York; Detroit; Philadelphia; Orlando and Palm Beach, Fla.; Pebble Beach, Calif.; Stockholm; Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Cologne, Germany; Brussels, and Tokyo. But the Hicks connection only began to leak out last July when his work was on view in Copenhagen.

A sharp-eyed observer who had a copy of “My Adventures in Europe” called the newspaper to report a startling resemblance between pictures in the book and Pavarotti’s artworks. Confronted with the book, Pavarotti is quoted as saying, “Of course I know that book,” and pointed out works he had copied. “I have never said I was a painter,” he said in the Danish newspaper article, apparently forgetting what he had told the American press about a month earlier in Washington. “I let myself be inspired by books from the very start,” he said, contradicting newspaper accounts of his Washington press conference, as well as his printed account of his rebirth as a painter.

Berlingske Tidende then assigned a Washington-based reporter to track down Hicks by telephone. When the call came, the artist was convalescing from a heart condition, so the reporter talked to Hicks’ sister, Buddy Steiner-Bandaras. The result was another article in the Danish newspaper, suggesting that Hicks wasn’t upset about the incident. Both Hicks and Steiner-Bandaras said they didn’t understand that the caller was a reporter or that Pavarotti had copied Hicks’ paintings.

Indeed, Hicks said she knew nothing of the affair until friends in Germany sent her a two-sentence notice that appeared in the Cologne Express after the Danish article was published. She had no idea which works he had copied or that he had made and sold silk-screen prints until her grandson, Stephen R. Welch, did some sleuthing.

Welch, who lives in Washington, is an analyst for a research firm. After visiting local libraries and the Danish Embassy, he compiled a stack of information about Pavarotti’s artworks and his exhibition in Washington. Much to his amazement, in article after article, he found reproductions of paintings that were obviously copied from his grandmother’s book.

There was no mention of her name, however. Instead, there were reports of the dignitaries and socialites who had attended the exhibition. There were also glowing reviews. “Pavarotti’s paintings are as exuberant and unstudied as his performances seem, and just as carefully crafted,” Hank Burchard wrote in the Washington Post. “At a glance his style is naif, but it’s a misleading impression caused by artful artlessness. Pavarotti’s amateur pose is undone by his sure perspective, sensitive brushwork and, most of all, the bravura use of color.”

Lucia Bertolucci wrote in Washington’s Uptown Citizen: “Each painting is fascinating for its own particular and distilled essence, its radiant color which permits us to glimpse vistas of Venetian buildings or landscapes through a color perspective. In his voice, his art and his presence Pavarotti speaks truth.”

Welch found the reports so offensive that he wrote to Hoffman asking for an itinerary of Pavarotti’s exhibitions, an accounting of sales of his artwork and a public acknowledgment of Hicks as the author of the three paintings.

Hoffman said that the first two requests are inappropriate and that Pavarotti has already complied with the third.

“When I called him and asked him what he wanted, he was vague,” Hoffman said. “I offered to draft a letter of appreciation to his grandmother and have Pavarotti sign it.”

Welch said that a letter to his grandmother is not the same as public recognition, especially for a woman at the end of her career. Hicks has been a lively member of the artistic community in La Veta, a small town near Pueblo, Colo. A founding member of the Friends of the Arts Guild, she has been a popular teacher and exhibitor. But a degenerative eye disease now prevents her from painting and recurrent heart problems have slowed her activities.

“My grandmother’s days as a painter are over. It would certainly be of great solace to her to know that she had some part in influencing someone of Luciano Pavarotti’s stature--and to be given proper and sincere credit for it,” Welch said.

“It’s a shame that she has to seek what should have been properly given to her. If painting means as much to Pavarotti as he says it does, if it has touched him in some way, he should understand how important my grandmother’s painting is to her and that she deserves recognition.”