Tim Lefens' Story
Nourishing Ideas > Philia in the Community > Art and Citizenship

I was never a "kind" person. It wasn't in my nature. Back then I was anything but. Wildly self-centered, I didn’t give presents or flatter people, stuff like that, no tenderness. My friends referred to me as ruthless and I guess I was.

My abstract paintings were being shown in New York, in solo exhibitions, getting kudos from the critics. I was swaggering with my buddies through lower Manhattan and across northern Italy. Total freedom. Total celebration.

Total self-absorption.

One day a friend asked if I'd show some slides of my artwork at a school for the severely disabled - people who couldn't walk or even talk. What the hell, I thought. Why not?

I had no idea what I was getting into.

When I strode through the automatic doors of the school, I was totally blown away. There were all these contorted bodies, arms strapped to wheelchairs or poking out at weird angles, limbs flailing, mouths drooling. Pretty radical stuff.

This was definitely not a world I wanted anything to do with - such suffocating limits, no freedom. In the room where I was to show the slides of my paintings, there was a guy sitting in his wheelchair, his brittle underdeveloped body strapped in, head held aloft by a network of stainless steel wires, hands dangling off the end of the armrests, fingers twisted, bent backwards, welded into knots. I didn't know where to look, but before I averted my eyes from fear, the guy caught me with his, his eyes, and held me with them. "I'm in here," they said without words, steely gray, intense, not weak. "Do you see me?"

I felt a bolt of voltage pass from him to me, the charge blowing through my body. There was a person in there! I took a closer look at the other patients who'd been wheeled in to see my art. The woman I'd seen in the hall, appearing brain-dead, staring at the floor, met my gaze with warm brown smiling eyes. They had given up looking to the staff, but a new person, they'd give a shot to see if there would be any recognition. She threw her head back with laughter, seeing both my fear and the fact that I had indeed seen her, seen the light of her life inside.

I see them! I thought. And they see I see them! Getting past their outer appearance, they suddenly appear as people full of energy.

The hospital staff bustled about, distant and distracted. I was supposed to talk about my work, so when the first slide went up, I spoke of the power and freedom of pure abstraction, speaking as I would to colleagues, not as to what some would think of as broken people incapable of sophisticated thought or feeling.

Pushing the shock of the experience even further, it was clear they were linking with the images, no doubt about it. My life of total physical freedom, their lives of total physical limitation. Maybe, maybe, painting could be a world we could enter together. But how, with no use of their hands, could this ever be?

Back home, I laid my forehead on the kitchen table, my mind lashed by unfamiliar emotions. I was being disassembled, my old arrogance shattered. All my life I'd been seeking that kind of keen energy in other people, most times to be sorely disappointed, and now here it was, in the most unexpected place, the least likely people. It was too brutal, them trapped not just by their bodies but by the people around them, paid to aid them toward freedom.

I became obsessed, thought about it 24-7, stopped working on my own stuff, dropped everything. Finally, after a bunch of sleepless nights, I knew what I had to do. I had to go back, to get that energy out somehow. Maybe they could paint - not with their bodies - but with their minds.

In a first, somewhat primitive technique, they directed their wheelchairs over paint-covered canvas, their wheel-tracks speaking for them as drawing. It was like unleashing a bunch of maniacs - very raw. One of the first artists, one of the rare ones who could speak, shouted "Wow!" as each new painting was revealed. "Wow!"

Her turn. She attacked her canvas, which was taped to the studio floor, jacking hard on the joystick of her electric wheelchair, jetting forward, then back, her head snapping back, then forward. Then, her wheelchair still, she began to revolve in place on the center of her painting, slowly at first, then faster and faster, round and round, faster, faster, faster. "Take me away!" she cried. "Take me away!"

After that, I was hooked. I thought of a better way for them to paint, with a laser attached to a headband. The students simply looked at where they wanted the paint to be placed and a trained studio assistant applied the paint. Every choice was now theirs - every detail, of color blending, application tool, size, and orientation of their canvas. The results were awesome. In no time the art world took notice. They had sellout shows in important galleries in New York City, their work selling for thousands of dollars.

For me, the best part was still the "outing": the moment when a quadriplegic snapped free of his limits and lost himself in the paint. Sometimes it happened immediately; sometimes I needed to goad them on, whisper a little in their ear: "Come on, get it going. Do it!" Suddenly that trapped spirit was free, expressing itself through the paint in a way that was absolutely coherent, absolutely magical.

And that's how it happened, how a group of "ultimate underdogs" tenderized my heart, how my casual what-the-hell stroll into a strange institution changed my life and led me into one of the most beautiful, profound things in the world - the liberation of people who never thought they'd be free.

I have my own physical challenge now. Got diagnosed with something called RP, retinitis pigmentosa. Doctors said I had two to five years of useful vision left. Don’t get weepy for me, it's been scary but I can still paint. The thing I want to tell you is how, when I was lowest, way down there, pretty close to giving up, it was the kids and young adults I worked with who lifted me up. As my sight got worse, they managed to ask about it without me having to say a word. When I fessed up, they gathered around, a close little circle, one of them saying quietly, "Maybe we don't have that much time." Then to break the spell of sadness they jumped back into their painting with added gusto and abandon, showing that when things go black you have only two choices: sit back or push on.

I helped them, then they helped me. It was rich, rich, good stuff. Proves it for real, that it' what' inside that counts and that anything is possible, the spirit indestructible. Thanks to this new world I entered and the vital power I'm   touched by, it’s a much deeper, more enthusiastic life than I could ever have dreamed.

Tim Lefens is an abstract painter and sculptor who lives in New Jersey. He is the Founder and Executive Director of Artistic Realization Technologies (A.R.T.), a non-profit organization that creates systems which enable the uncompromised creative self-expression of people with the most severe physical challenges.

This is the abridged version of Tim Lefens' story. Read more in Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World by Craig and Marc Kielburger. Visit www.metowe.org to order the book and to join the online Me to We community. Also available at amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

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