Fifteen years ago, Tim Lefens accepted an invitation to make a guest artist appearance at the Matheny School, a New Jersey residential facility for kids with disabilities. Lefens, a painter, wasn’t prepared for what he found there. The kids, mostly quadriplegic and unable to speak, faced extreme physical challenges. Here’s his description of the first of three students who showed up for his lecture, from Flying Colors, his 2002 book about the experience:
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The kids were captives, serving life sentences in their own dysfunctional bodies. But what disturbed Lefens even more was the disconnect between the glimpse he got of the fire inside them and what he’d seen of their existence at the school—strapped into wheelchairs and parked in front of the TV watching Barney, for example. Again, from Flying Colors: “It is difficult to imagine anything harder than the restrictions they endure. But there is something worse—if they, as it appeared to me, are as alive as you or me and they are being treated like idiots.”
Rejecting the hand-on-hand method that was standard—and that results in art created by the teacher, not the student, he says—Lefens began with a wheelchair technique. He taped canvases to the floor, lathered them in paint, covered the wet paint with a sheet of plastic, and then let the kids roll across, turning the wheels into a tool. When they quickly exhausted the possibilities of that cumbersome approach, he came up with a much better one. Recognizing that his students needed equipment that would be fast and precise, Lefens jury-rigged a gizmo similar to the face guard worn by football players, and attached a laser pointer to the front of it, at about nose height. Sit before a canvas wearing this contraption and your slightest head movement will direct the laser beam. Add an assistant (a “tracker” in Lefens’s lingo) who follows the beam in whatever pattern it describes, using colors and tools chosen by the artist, and you can wind up with paintings by kids who not only can’t lift a brush but probably haven’t executed a plan of their own in their entire lives.
His references are raves. Gail Lesko, a manager for Manasota ARC, a day program in Bradenton, Florida, says they’ve had an A.R.T. program for a year with 12 artists and four trackers, and “it’s one of the best things we ever did.” Lesko says paintings have sold for as much as $1,500 (split 60/40 between the institution and the artist), and that the proceeds, along with grant money, cover the cost of the program. “But,” she says, “the most important thing is what the artists are getting out of it.”
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