Photos by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Eddie Maxwell looks for his brushes before he starts painting in his apartment.

A face that painter Eddie Maxwell calls 'Momeneer' appears near the center of the painting 'September Morning' when it is turned on its end. See a larger version.

The painter Eddie Maxwell opened the door to his one-room apartment downtown and apologized for the mess.

Inside, dry paint dappled door knobs, the refrigerator and the dresser. A dirty neck brace rested on one of two chairs.

A forest landscape sat on an easel, but Maxwell wanted to talk about a different painting, “September Morning.”

He picked that landscape off the floor, flipped it on one end and pointed.

“You see him?”

The “him” Maxwell referred to was three trees, now horizontal, that looked vaguely like one long eyebrow, a nose and mouth.

Maxwell calls the face Momeneer.

He says the face talks to him. He says it has been giving him advice since he painted it some 10 years ago.

“He’s looking at you,” Maxwell said. “Look at Momeneer. He likes you.”

Maxwell is a mystic painter. He believes images emerge in his canvases. In his mind, the images appear, disappear and reappear, often in different places.

Jesus shows up. So does Elvis Presley.

But Momeneer is the only image that speaks.

What does it say?

Maxwell considered the question and then answered in a slurred and shaky rapid fire .

The face tells him to stop fiddling with his paintings and let the images appear.

It tells him he will be famous.

It tells him to stay in Roanoke because that is where it will happen.

“Momeneer says I am not supposed to have any doubt,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell resembles the elderly Jerry Lee Lewis. His gray hair is raked to the right, the same way as his bent nose. His eyes are the color of blurry blue sea glass.

He tells people he is 80. But like most things about Eddie Maxwell, the fact of the matter is open to question.

Jonathan McGraw, owner of the gallery McGraw Fine Art, which in December and January held an exhibit of Maxwell’s work, said the painter is probably closer to 83.

“He doesn’t like to be thought of as old,” McGraw said.

“I don’t think my age has anything to do with anything,” Maxwell said.

During the exhibit, McGraw sold three of Maxwell’s paintings, the highest at $3,000.

The sales brought the most money Maxwell has made from his art since his mid-60s, when a crisis led him to start painting.

Maxwell grew up in Bluefield, W.Va. After a stint in the Army he spent 18 years working at Norfolk and Western, traveling the country and carousing.

“Every town I went through I had some woman,” he said. “I had more women than you could shake a stick at.”

After he retired from the railroad, Maxwell said, he went to beauty school and opened a hair salon in Arlington. He divorced twice and had four children along the way.

On his dresser, Maxwell keeps a photo album filled with pictures from that life. Most seem to have been taken at cocktail parties. In them, Maxwell looks rakish, a drink in one hand, an arm around a woman.

That life ended in 1989, when Maxwell says a seizure caused by stress sent him to the hospital and shot his nerves.

He lost his salon and money and started painting.

The way Maxwell describes it, he began painting in a trance-like state. Sometimes it lasted all night and through the next day.

Then the images appeared, the first a blazing white image of Jesus on the cross.

At first, the images scared him. He tried to paint them out, but they came back, in different spots.

Maxwell first saw Momeneer soon after he moved to Roanoke in the late ’90s.

He was looking at “September Morning” when a voice in his head told him to turn the painting on its end.

He saw the face. Maxwell has talked to it most days since.

Maxwell thinks Momeneer is his guardian angel. He believes Momeneer directs his painting by holding him back, keeping him from impeding the visions.

“I’ve got to the point now, what would I do without him?” he said.

Maxwell paints magical forests with pools of water and shafts of light breaking through the canopy. He also paints portraits, most often of Dottie, a former girlfriend, and Jesus.

A typical Maxwell painting is a layered mass of acrylics, oils and watercolors. Sometimes he uses markers and modeling clay. Occasionally he adds spray paint.

Inside Maxwell’s apartment, half-painted canvases are piled under his bed, which he covers with cardboard to keep his black cat “Baby” from using it for a litter box.

Maxwell gets around town on an electric three-wheel scooter. He lives off his retirement check.

Aside from visits from McGraw, Meals on Wheels and neighbors who go to the grocery story for him, Maxwell spends most days alone, painting to the rhythms of easy listening that flow from his television.

He likes instrumentals with bright piano and strings.

“Sinatra was my idol,” he said. “Until he started to swing too much.”

Sometimes, the images Maxwell sees in his paintings are easy to pick out.

Other times they are impossible, like the can of Coke Maxwell sees a girl drinking from with a straw in one of his recent landscapes.

McGraw said visitors to Maxwell’s exhibits saw some of them and didn’t see others. But he believes in Maxwell’s visions.

“I trust that everything he experiences is real to him,” McGraw said. “I have no reason to doubt that he is telling the truth.”

Maxwell knows some people think he is insane. He knows others think he is faking it to add a sense of the bizarre to his work.

He would think so, too, he said, if he hadn’t seen the face and heard Momeneer speak.

Maxwell turned toward the painting.

“Look at Momeneer. He’s looking at you, I can’t believe it,” he said.