To try to lift her spirits ("I worried she felt her life was over"), Fittipaldi's husband, Al, encouraged her to find a hobby, to reach out to friends—all to no avail. Finally, one day in 1995, after learning that psychologists often recommend art as therapy for depression, he brought home a set of watercolors. "I threw them at her and said, 'I don't care what you do—just do something!' " he recalls. Stung by what she felt was Al's insensitivity, Fittipaldi, who had never even drawn before, presented him hours later with a picture of four colored glass jars, images she drew on from memory. "I did it," she says, "just to shut him up."
But the piece, recalls Al, "was really good." So good, he encouraged Lisa to join a friend who had signed up for a two-week art-instruction class at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La. There, Fittipaldi, now 53, learned basic painting techniques as well as strategies for memorizing her palettes and creating outlines. She has been painting ever since, and in 1998, Al sent out press packets with samples of her work to art galleries, catching the attention of Dallas's Florence Art Gallery. At her first show, held there in 1998, she sold all 14 of her works, netting more than $20,000. Her paintings, primarily watercolors and oils, now hang in more than 30 galleries nationwide.
"When customers learn she's blind, the reaction is, 'Oh, my God. I can't believe it,' " says Michael O'Mahony, owner of the Miami-based Wentworth Gallery, which has sold 40 of Fittipaldi's paintings at prices up to $10,000. But, he adds, "her work stands on its own."
To compensate for things she cannot see, Fittipaldi relies on her other senses. By listening to what's going on around her, for example, she can imagine street scenes and portraits. As for depicting facial expressions, she says, "I just know, based on the mental picture I have, whether the details are coming out right." Says Douglas Walton, her former art instructor: "She captures the true inner spirit more than most sighted artists. She paints from the heart."
The oldest of three children born in Pontiac, Mich., to Irving, a camera-store operator, and Shirley, a homemaker (both now deceased), Fittipaldi graduated from the University of Michigan in 1970 with a major in English. She then attended nursing school at the University of South Carolina, where she met Al, now 56, who was starting a career in the U.S. Navy with the Medical Service Corps. The couple, who have no children, married in 1974 and spent two decades living on Navy bases around the U.S. until Al's 1996 retirement; four years later they settled in San Antonio.
Along the way, Fittipaldi abandoned nursing and became an accountant. A financial analyst at an Austin hospital, she was driving on a freeway in March 1993 when suddenly but briefly everything went dark. "I thought I had just zoned out," she recalls. She brushed off the incident—until two weeks later, when it happened again.
Within six months she was declared legally blind, although it wasn't until 1998 that she was finally diagnosed with vasculitis, a genetic disorder that inflames blood vessels, blocking circulation to tissues and organs. This year the disease began attacking her hearing.
"We just don't have a cure for her problem," says Dr. Michael Nacol, Fittipaldi's internist. Although chemotherapy and steroids are keeping the vasculitis in check, Nacol says, "her prognosis is poor," because eventually the disease is likely to attack a major organ, such as her heart.
Determined not to dwell on her fading health, Fittipaldi takes yoga classes three times a week to keep up her strength. She also cooks, baking muffins from recipes she knows by heart for guests at Beauregard House, the bed-and-breakfast she and Al opened in San Antonio last year. It is her art, however, that she credits with salvaging her life. "When you lose your vision, you lose your world," she says. "My painting re-created my world."
Galina Espinoza
Chris Coats in San Antonio
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
