May 12, 2008

Her paintbrush helps Kenyans fight AIDS/HIV

By JOHN CARLSON
jcarlson@muncie.gannett.com

Martha Gilliom displays note cards featuring her paintings. They are being sold to raise funds for the Academic Model for Prevention and Transmission of HIV/AIDS. (John Carlson / The Star Press)

MUNCIE -- A skilled watercolorist, Martha Gilliom takes great pleasure in painting, something that she didn't embrace until she was in her mid-30s.

But the ability to help others by painting makes it all the more satisfying.

Gilliom's works are being used on note cards, plus being sold as prints, to benefit AMPATH, the Academic Model for Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Born of the pairing of Indiana University School of Medicine with the Moi University School of Medicine, the resultant Indiana-Kenya Partnership's Nobel Prize-nominated AMPATH program is one of Africa's strongest HIV/AIDS control systems, treating untold thousands of patients.

"The idea that my art is being used in a way to benefit somebody is humbling to me," the 52-year-old artist said. "I never anticipated my art being used this way."

The roots of this arrangement go back to when Karin Lane, the daughter of good friends, baby-sat for the Gillioms' two sons, now age 25 and 22.

Fast forward a couple of decades or so, and her relationship with Lane has changed.

"At this age, we're friends," the painter said.

Having long ago left baby-sitting behind, Lane is Indiana-Kenya Partnership's associate field director in Eldoret, Kenya. Shown some photographs that Lane had taken in Africa of elephants, mottled water jugs and little children carrying even smaller ones, the artist was touched.

"I said I'd like that, that, that and that," Gilliom recalled of first viewing the photos, "but I had no thought of doing anything with them."

Being an artist, however, she soon was using the photographs as models to put brush to paper.

"I just paint because I want to paint," she explained of her passion for art. "If I had my druthers, that's what I'd do all the time. Art is a vocation, at least for me."

In fact, she admitted that she's driven to paint.

"I don't know any artist who isn't," said Gilliom, who launched her career by auditing a drawing class at Ball State University, then studying watercolor painting with local artist Brian Gordy.

Home on leave in the wake of a spate of Kenyan violence, Lane saw her friend's artwork based on her own photographs. After Gilliom gave the first of those paintings to her, Lane was inspired.

"It was her idea to use them as a fundraiser for the program," recalled the painter, a confident and energetic woman with a quick laugh who wears her dark hair short.

A former contract faculty member who taught aerobics and yoga at BSU, she is quick to pass on credit for the program to others, citing people such as Ron Naylor at First Presbyterian Church, Lane's mother Judy, Gordy and his wife, Genny, of Gordy Fine Art & Framing, and Greg Harty of Jack's Camera Shop for their help.

"This is really a cooperative effort," she said. "I just happen to be the one who painted."

Packets of the note cards cost $25 and are available at Naylor's church office. The prints, which cost $85, $150 or $250 depending on size, are available by e-mailing Gilliom at artforampath@yahoo.com. They are reproduced by a method called "giclee."

"It's intended to last a hundred years," she said, "so it's a very high end of reproduction."

All proceeds from sale of the cards and paintings go to AMPATH, to which the artist is happy to donate her work.

"It's really an astonishing program," she said, "and it's right here in Indiana."

How much does she hope to help make for the program? That's anybody's guess.

"I have no idea how far this is going to go," she said. "In some ways, this thing just took on a life of its own."

Gillion is doing what she can to help it along, though.

"I have shamelessly hawked it to everybody I know," she admitted, laughing.