LEWISTON – With his pen secured tightly between his fingers and his glasses resting loosely on his nose, Gary Monto hunches over a piece of paper and forgets about his problems.

It doesn’t matter that he has no girlfriend. Or that he is bipolar and diabetic. Or that he doesn’t have enough money to buy oil paints.

“All I need is paper and a pencil and I zone out,” he says, sitting at a table in the Lisbon Street coffee shop where he spends at least two hours every other day leaning over a piece of paper.

Monto, 51, has been drawing since he was 5. He used to sit at his kitchen table and doodle for hours. The oldest of eight kids, Monto sketched his favorite comics characters without realizing that drawing was his way of coping.

It relaxed him. It made him worry less about what would happen when his father came home drunk and angry, as he did night after night.

When Monto grew tired of drawing Beetle Bailey, he started experimenting with his own designs. He would see something in his head – a dog in the middle of an intricate pattern, a collage of decorative circles, a system of detailed lines, dots and other figures. Then he would draw it.

“I can feel it,” he says, slowly, softly. “It’s like the designs flow out of my hands like a river.”

Monto eventually left Maine and moved to Texas, where he got married and worked as a groundskeeper at a nursing home. He continued to draw – at home and at local restaurants – until 1993.

He isn’t sure why he stopped. It was the year that he and his wife bought a new house and were busy fixing it up. It was also the year that he was diagnosed with being bipolar.

Looking back, he realizes that he probably needed his drawing more than ever. But it wasn’t until two years ago, after he moved back to Lewiston to take care of his widowed mother, that he started again.

He met a woman who didn’t believe that he was an artist, so he drew a picture to prove it. He forgot how good it felt.

Monto has since created an art studio in his Pine Street apartment, but he likes to get out where people can see him and his work. Some days, he sketches one design or cartoon all day. Other days, he works on several at once.

He doesn’t sell his pieces, but he has given a few away.

People often approach him at Manic Designs, the small coffee shop and eatery where he goes to draw, and ask to see his work. A woman from Taiwan recently told him that one of his designs reminded her of the village where she grew up. She asked how he came up with it.

“It’s just how I feel,” Monto told her. “It’s hard to explain.”