Lincoln – The painter’s latest project didn’t start out as art.

Albert Maxey’s friend had found an old closet rod in her garage, and – early in the pandemic, when the concept of social distancing was still as novel as the virus itself – she carried the 6-foot stick to his Haymarket gallery.

“I put the stick between us and said, ‘That’s about how far we need to stand, Albert,’“ Diane Reinsch remembered.

She was just there to catch up – the two used to teach together at the Lincoln Public Schools expelled students program – not to commission art. But then the idea hit her.

“You should paint this for me,” she told him. “And I can use it to keep distance.”

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that Maxey had been an artist since high school in Indiana. He studied art and education at the University of Nebraska, sketched suspect composites during his career with the Lincoln Police Department, and opened his gallery in 2004.

He prefers to paint on canvas – everything from abstracts to animals – though he has decorated a pair of Mexican-themed interior doors. But he’d never painted a stick before.

So for the first piece in what would become his Distance Assistance series, Maxey considered the colors of Reinsch’s walls and her furniture and came up with a palette – pinks and white and soft blues.

He sanded the dowel smooth, drilled a hole for a strap and started taping and painting, taping and painting. When he was done, he signed his name, covered it in clear coat and presented it to his newest customer.

Reinsch loved it. And so did her brother, who immediately ordered one of his own, and coined the term Distance Assistance.

“I write poetry,” said Phil Dawson of Fremont. “I’m used to having things rhyme. It seemed like a good fit.”

Word spread. Maxey got a third request, and a fourth, customers willing to pay roughly $150 for a Distance Assistance stick.

He’d buy 12-foot closet rods at Menards and cut them in half. On average, he would spend a couple of weeks creating a distance stick, selecting the colors and patterns that would work on such a long and slender space.

“But it could go a month, based on how I decided to look at it and meditate over it and think about it,” he said. “I stare at them and try to think of something that will look unique.”

The artist was fortunate. The pandemic had slowed – even closed – much of the economy, but it had created a demand for his art.

The coronavirus was keeping Maxey busy. Until it put him in the hospital.

The symptoms started stacking up in late September. A headache. A fever that spiked and fell. Soreness in his muscles and joints.

His sense of taste disappeared, and then his appetite.

He’d start coughing and couldn’t stop.

“I think I had the full-blown thing,” he said.

He took a COVID-19 test and ended up on oxygen at Bryan West Campus.

“I said a lot of prayers and had a lot of people praying for me, a lot of concerned phone calls. I had lots of support that way.”

Maxey never feared he was dying, he said. Still, he knew it was serious; at 82, he was in one of the highest-risk categories.

“It was kind of scary,” he said. “But I thought I was fit for my age.”

Before he was a teacher, and a police officer, Maxey was a full-scholarship player on the Nebraska basketball team, and before that, a guard who helped lead Indiana’s Crispus Attucks High School to a pair of state championships, alongside his teammate and future best man Oscar Robertson.

He’d stayed in shape. Just a few years ago, Maxey was still cycling around the state every summer with Tour de Nebraska.

He left the hospital after five days and quarantined at home under a nurse’s care for another 12.

Plenty of time to consider his art. “You can’t help but think about it,” he said. “It gave me more time when I was confined to my apartment.”

Before, the virus was conceptual, abstract, and he’d created his distance sticks without fully understanding the danger they were designed to keep at bay.

But now he plans to incorporate what he lived through. He can picture a stick with a slender bed and a battery of hospital equipment. Or a stick with a series of circles, people of different colors, featureless faces of COVID-19.

His first distance sticks are still useful, even if he painted them before he contracted the virus.

Reinsch views hers as a dual-purpose piece. She keeps it on display as a piece of art, its colors complementing her home.

But she takes it with her when she goes for walks.

“It’s doing a great job,” she said. “Nobody’s coming near me.”

This story first appeared in The Lincoln Journal Star. It was distributed as a member exchange story by The Associated Press.