An Interview with TIM LEFENS: Painter, Art Activist

Tim Lefens has opened a new world for the severely physically challenged. As Founder and Executive Director of A.R.T.(Artistic Realization Technologies), he has pioneered new ways for this population to express themselves creatively through art. He has cognitively freed them and watched their self-esteem and sense of purpose blossom.  Tim’s own book, Flying Colors, is a testament to the power of his work. At 57, Tim has been blind for years but his passion and dedication to the A.R.T. mission remains at full throttle.

I am very pleased to have had the opportunity to talk with him.

Before you started A.R.T, you were actively involved in your own art as a painter. Did you have formal education and/or training in Art? Can you talk about your art now?

Yes, I went to art school and had a long string of great mentors including artists Roy Lichtenstein and Walter Darby Bannard as well as the renowned art critic Clement Greenberg . These were professionals who adopted me and helped tune in my understanding of art.

I won the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award for Painting and continue to paint. My shows have been in the New York Brooke Alexander and Farah Damji galleries as well as in New Jersey galleries. Current work can be seen on my website.

I’ve almost always been close to monochrome even when I had 20/20 vision. Also I have never really been into color but more focused on drawing and tactility. By just using your hands and imagination, you can feel the shape of the painting and know where you’re placing the built up paint. When it comes time to add color, I simply talk to someone to get the color I want.

What areas of the creative process does A.R.T. address? How are the components designed?

There is Painting, Sculpture, Music Composition, and Photography. The A.R.T. artists are in wheelchairs; often quadriplegic with limited speech so they need mechanisms that can adjust to them. In the painting program, they will wear headbands with a laser in the front. They direct the laser to a wall area where they can then select the brush size and color paint and a "tracker", (an able bodied assistant) facilitates their choice on the canvas at their direction which is again laser driven. In this way, painting is the least technical area because it only uses a laser; it’s a core basic program and the not expensive. The Music program works with our light actuated synthesizer with light sensitive diodes and costs thousands of dollars.

By interacting directly with an A.R.T. artist, I get ideas of how things should be done technically; for example, how the sculpture should move, how they can select the music notes. And I think about how that can be done with power. I have been fortunate to find engineers who have offered their services at very modest fees and have been able to develop the device. There are no patents for these devices; there are only prototypes and they have never been replicated.

Your A.R.T program involves recruiting physically challenged people to participate in the creative process, seeking financial sponsorships, and harnessing technology. Where are the greatest challenges?

After about 17 years of being on the road, our biggest challenge is in the perception of the able bodied. We manage to get some funding to keep going and have solved the problems of the population we are serving. However our challenge is not the quadriplegic non-verbal people; the challenge is how they are seen by the able bodied. So we are always working on this. If the physically challenged are thought of as incapable, then they are treated as incapable and there is no way out.

Who are your funders?
My funders include
the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which gave us both their Community Health Leadership and President's awards
The Kessler Foundation
The New York Community Trust
Johnson and Johnson
Morgan Stanley
Verizon
Princeton University
The Llura Gund Foundation and
The National Endowment for the Arts


Your book, Flying Colors, talks about your personal and professional journey with A.R.T. It's quite extraordinary.

I was fortunate to have success with it; the book has now been translated in Chinese.

The A.R.T. program is now running in multiple locations around the country. Can you talk about that?

There are about 27 fully functional satellites including the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. Once we saw the breakthrough in 1994 and how easy it works and profoundly effective; we had a goal to be global. Our first trip was to California and then we went to New Mexico, Florida, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio. We will go anywhere we can. Some of these states have multiple sites. For example, in Florida, we have 7 sites, in Pennsylvania there are 2, Ohio has 1; each state is different.
We want the people running the sites to bond with us so we can provide guidance. Those who have realized that benefit have succeeded big time especially since talking to us does not cost them.

The sites sell paintings to help fund their programs but they also need grants. For exhibitions, I urge them to aim high; to have a show in a museum rather than a café. Art shows tend to move people who have the capacity to fund and successful examples are Little Rock, Arkansas and Jacksonville Florida which are selling hundreds of paintings. At both sites, we are in touch weekly.

For new sites, they find us or we find them. Then we assess their situation; they need a minimum of 5 people to launch the A.R.T. program. After months of pre education, once they’re ready we fly out. Then after we do the workshops on site, it is not unusual to hear the staff sobbing and leaving the room because they have been working with these people forever and now all of a sudden they’re alive. It’s very intense.

In A.R.T. exhibitions, some artists sell their work for substantial sums of money. How are they priced and do you court collectors

Pricing is tricky and basically it is what the market will bear. A high selling mark is about $2400. Our collectors include a former governor and other serious buyers. One collector, a marine supply company, has purchased over 70 paintings from our Jacksonville site to fill offices at corporate headquarters. Then once they were filled, they started shipping art pieces to their sister headquarters in the Netherlands. Now they are moving to Houston so we hope to open that market.


You have suffered with a vision problem and are now totally blind. This must be an extraordinary challenge for you to manage your work. How long had it been progressing and how do you manage A.R.T?

They don’t really know what the condition is but have labeled it retinitis pigmentosa. I was diagnosed in 1988 and had no visual aids. However, the miracle was the talking computer because I wrote the entire Flying Colors book without a computer screen. Window Eyes was the software I used to write; it was very fast and the editor did not change one word.

I do not accommodate or embrace my condition. I do not deny that I am blind but I do deny its presence. I also work in an absorption mode which is when you have something so fascinating in your life that it displaces thoughts of having a disability. So my approach is a unique combination of denial and absorption.

In a perfect world, what would you imagine for A.R.T ?

That A.R.T will be universally accepted and embraced. That we give the population that we work with and love not only respect, joy and freedom but it also wake up the able bodied. Everyone would realize that you cannot judge a person from the outside. Period.

To contact Tim and/or donate, please click here

CHALLENGING ART

Art sits in our universe isolated except for our presence to view it. Yet it is tethered to the creator of the piece who brought his/her passion, imagination and vision to reality.

Sometimes we know about the artist. S/he can be famous or someone totally unknown to us. Our thoughts reside with what we see and assume; an unconscious assumption is that the artist is able bodied. Yet there are many great artists who have met extraordinary challenges to bring their art to our lives. That journey, although not easy was triumphant; filled with an insatiable need to create, powered by the strength to overcome their afflictions and determined to capture all that was important to them. They have transformed their lives and consequently may transform our lives by example.

 Deaf, illiterate, with minimal language skills and probably autistic, James Castle created art. Being pragmatic, he used found materials such as bulk mail, cardboard cartons, and cigarette packages for surfaces, sharpened sticks and twigs for pens, stove soot mixed with his saliva for ink and flour with water to make paste. A self taught artist who lived a relatively isolated life; he beautifully mastered the concept of composition and perspective. His drawings, collages and constructions are now recognized worldwide.

 Georgia O’Keefe was a famous American painter who pursued her art even through her elderly years when her health was quite compromised. By the time she was 84 years old, Georgia had only peripheral vision but continued her painting and sculpting by directing an assistant for help. To alleviate the stress of painting and to keep her creative verve, she soon began exploring a new medium, clay, that would offer a tactile experience to compensate for her vision loss and was less visually demanding. Only weeks before her death at a frail 98 years old, she continued to create art.

 Stricken with polio and unable to use his arms, Erich Stegmann learned to use a mouth held brush to draw and paint. Realizing there must be other talented artists who were similarly compromised, he started the Association of Mouth Foot Painting Artists which now includes over 700 artists worldwide. They use either mouth held brushes or toe clenched brushes to create extraordinary art work marketed as greeting cards, calendars, prints and illustrated books. Their goal is to encourage artistic potential and secure financial independence through their art.

 Tim Lefens confesses to have been a self absorbed artist when a friend asked him to show his slides at a school for people who could not walk and/or talk. Then his life turned around. He felt compelled to creatively engage these people who were trapped inside bodies that were twisted and distorted; harnessed inflexibly for movement but quietly alive inside. His first approach was to enable their painting by using the wheelchair to make tracks on a floor canvas. After realizing its limitations, he developed a more controlled and dynamic process using headbands equipped with laser beams to select paint colors, brush sizes and location on wall canvas. His non profit Art Realization Technologies, (A.R.T.) “creates systems which enable the uncompromised creative self-expression of people with the most severe physical challenges”.

 Disabled and in constant pain after a trolley accident ripped through her pelvis and spine and left her with broken ribs and eleven fractures in her leg. Frida Kahlo channeled her energy in to art. She was in a body cast and in bed when she began painting self portraits "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best." Her paintings often used symbols and depicted her physical and psychological distress as well as her love of nature and Diego Rivera, her husband and mentor. In 1939 when the Louvre in Paris bought a Kahlo painting, it was its first acquisition of 20th century Mexican art.

 With Down’s syndrome, an inability to hear or speak and thought to be severely retarded, Judith Scott spent 35 years in an institution until her twin sister obtained her release. A self taught artist, she went to a facility every day that encouraged creativity for disabled adults. It was there that she created large non functioning fiber sculptures using discarded objects; wrapping them in bundles and sometimes using other objects. Although she did not understand art or the importance of her work, her sculptures are now shown in galleries and museums around the world.

“Artists with transforming illnesses are heroes of creativity and role models for us all. Working despite innumerable hardships, they shape the essence of our culture and create great beauty in our lives.”-Dr. Tobi Zausner

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is, but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”-Goethe