"Bowl of Fruit" by Marie Bailey
People with severe disabilities are learning to express themselves through art, thanks to the passion of Tim Lefens, named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Community Health Leader in 1998.
The problem. People with severe physical disabilities often feel that the essence of who they are is trapped inside their bodies. And they are often infantilized, treated as if they have little to offer. How can people who cannot walk or talk and have limited use of their hands experience the joy of creating their own art?
Finding his passion in the Big Apple. From the time he was able to hold a paintbrush, Tim Lefens was making art. Recognizing his gift, his parents sometimes invited little Tim to draw a picture to entertain their friends at dinner parties.
When Lefens was in first grade, the family relocated from Michigan to Belle Mead, N.J.—a fortuitous move, Lefens says, because it was just a bus ride to the art museums of Manhattan. His favorite, the Museum of Modern Art, was right next to the office where his father worked as a civil engineer.
By the time he was in high school, Lefens wanted to do nothing else but draw and paint—much to the displeasure of the teachers whose classes he ignored. He poured over art books filled with the works of Manet, Cezanne and Picasso. “Their quest to push their paintings to the frontier of art read to me like a story of adventure,” he wrote in his book Flying Colors: The Story of a Remarkable Group of Artists and the Transcendent Power of Art. “In time, I pictured painting that would go even further; painting that would connect more directly with the flash of raw energy I experienced being alive.”
Pushing the limits of art. Lefens needed a guide into the realm of abstract art. He found one in a friend’s father —painter Roy Lichtenstein who chauffeured the boys to the beach in the summer and invited Lefens into his studio in Southampton, Long Island, N.Y.
Lefens went to art school in Utah, where the works of purely abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning introduced him to “a visual language I could use to go directly to the life I sensed inside,” Lefens writes in Flying Colors. He transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which had an art program sympathetic to abstraction. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1977, he trained at the Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Jersey.
The light is going out. By the early 1980s, Lefens work had been shown in New York art galleries and caught the attention of influential art critics. Lefens recalls this time as a swirl of loft parties in lower Manhattan, surfing Tres Palmas in Puerto Rico, and trips to arts venues in Italy.
Then in 1988, Lefens began noticing changes in his vision and soon heard the news no visual artist should hear. “You have retinitis pigmentosa,” the doctor told him. “You have two years, five at the outside, of usable vision left.”
Three consecutive specialists made wisecracks to the effect of, “Well, it’s a good thing you’re an abstract painter because you don’t need your eyes.”
“I vowed I would never put myself in the hands of an eye doctor who was not also an artist,” Lefens says.
He eventually found an ophthalmologist who was also a sculptor. In his office, Lefens showed him reproductions of his paintings. The doctor looked carefully at each image, looked up at Lefens and said, “I’d like you to come to the school where I am teaching. They’re starting an art program. I’d like you to show slides of your work to my students.”
