"You are very...er, nice," ITV host Gaby Gazit concluded in his interview a few months ago with Israel's latest talent discovery - Haifa-born painter Limor Matisis Barnea. Sounding slightly confused, Gazit presumably found it difficult to recocile the artist's serene appearance tth the boldness of her work.

Well, she certainly is nice. Yet for the last ten years she has been suffering from a chronic auto-immune condition called lupus, a fact that journalist Sari Makover chose to stress in her feature about Matisis published by Ma'ariv last summer.

Although many great painters' afflictions have been partly responsible for the direction of their artistic development = such as Van Gogh, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Frida Kahlo and Matisis' almost-namesake Matisse who was pathologically choleric - Matisis' condition at first blocked the pursuit of her talent.

Yet in spite of her illness, she hasn't changed much since I first met her as a young art student in Germany. Following graphic design studies at Neri Bloomfield College in Haifa, Matisis spent four years at the School of Art and Design in Cologne and studied further with Professor Klappek at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf following a study visit to Italy and exhibitions in Cologne and Vienna.

In 1986, she returned to Israel and later to Neri Bloomfield College, where she spent four years studying fashion design. Around the time she graduated, she was told that she was chronically ill. She worked as a fashion designer for short periods of time - but stopped painting. For almost a decade, nothing came out of her studio. In the meantime, she married Joseph Barnea, moved to Modi'in and raised her son Tomer who is now ten years old.

When asked why she suddenly took up the paint brush again, she simply replies, "I felt it was time..." With her slight figure and gentle manner, one would call her petite, yet her paintings are anything but. They are large, colourful, impressive canvases done with a keen sense of shape and color and a talent with oils and brushes which accounts for the vivid realism of her renderings. Matisis paints in the classical style dating all the way back to the Renaissance.

Things don't come easy to her, and being serious about her art, Matisis grapples intensively with it. She invests a lot in her work which becomes obvious in the quality she achieves. Take for example the flowers on the canvas The Human Arena which shows a bull fight in Iberia, inspired in a part by Ernest Hemingway: man and beast, life and death. For days, Matisis brought bunch of roses into her studio to be immortalized in oils, since she felt they were opening too quickly for her to catch properly. Yet they look so real that one is tempted to pick them off the painting and put them in water. 

The canvas Butterflies is not only a homage to the art of body painting - Matisis covered her model's face elaborately with colorful butterflies - but also points to the skin rashes that are a symptom of her illness and often take the form of butterflies.

The Story of Fashion reveals Matisis' background in fashion design as well as her quest for freedom from the chains of both her handicap and society's inhibitions. Based on her family history and the way her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother used to dress, the painting depicts the development of ladies' fashion from tight, restrictive and stifling garments to a much wider choice of liberating and airy clothes.

The subject range of Matisis' work clearly reflects her preoccupations: her life, history' family and illness. And, of course, her deep interest in all of the arts - dance, fashion and design.

So ultimately, does Matisis' illness indeed direct her art? It still remains a difficult question to answer. There is certainly a new maturity in her recent paintings when compared with her early work; they have a greater depth both in structure and spirit, in detail and overall composition, which may partly stem from her suffering. Yet the sources of her talent are multiple and as such, we may never really know...