Tim Lefens’ creations help the handicapped express themselves.
By: Steve Rauscher
MONTGOMERY Dressed in rumpled, paint-spattered denim, Tim Lefens looks every bit the artist.
Mr. Lefens, who may be Montgomery’s only resident abstract painter, bounds around his Belle Mead home with an energy belied by his graying appearance. He skitters up the stairs into his office, eager to show off his latest creation.
But Mr. Lefens does not point to a canvas covered in multi-colored geometric shapes or splatters of paint. For more than seven years he has been devoting his energy to something else. He began after he was invited to show his work at a school, he says.
"The shocker was that I didn’t know what kind of school it was," he says.
Mr. Lefens, it turned out, had been invited to show his paintings to a group of severely physically handicapped teen-agers.
"I got there and I saw these kids were the most seriously, multiply, physically challenged kids you’ve ever seen. That got my attention."
After showing his work to the students, he was invited to take a look at their own art.
"All the projects were similar, and random and grotesque," he says. "It was like someone else had broken up Styrofoam and poured paint on it. And it didn’t look like anything they could have done physically."
The idea that someone was creating awful art in the name of the students offended him, Mr. Lefens said. And so he set out to find a way that would let them paint what they saw in their minds.
"The whole idea would be to ask the question ‘How could they express themselves so that the marks they made weren’t reflections of their physical limitations?’," he says.
Mr. Lefens eventually developed a system that allowed the students to paint using a headband equipped with a laser, guiding a human "tracker" who asks a long list of yes or no questions about color and texture before applying the paint to the canvas according to the beam of the laser. Many of the resulting paintings have been shown and sold in Manhattan art galleries, eclipsing the work of more established, able-bodied artists.
Because of their forced solitude, the handicapped students pour every ounce of their being into their creations, Mr. Lefens said. Because of that, nearly every person he has worked with routinely produces better work than many art students.
"You take 10 (handicapped) kids, and 10 people from Nassau Street, and all 10 of them are going to make better paintings than any one from Nassau Street," he says.
Having been so successful with his painting program, Mr. Lefens turned his attention to music. He has just recently completed work on a prototype that will enable handicapped students to compose music through a similar laser-guided technique. Shaped like a giant doughnut with eyebrows, the "LASSY" or Light-actuated Synthesizer consists of dozens of photosensitive cells about two inches across arranged in three concentric rings, corresponding to the keys on a synthesizer. Two rows of cells arranged on the top right and left sides of the rings control tone and tempo. The laser pointer acts on the cells as a finger acts on a keyboard.
"This is a compositional tool," Mr. Lefens says. "No one’s going to be playing this as a musical instrument."
He feels confident that handicapped students untrained in music theory will create valid, artistic pieces with the LASSY, as well as they did with his other creations.
"When these guys are painting, they’re talking, they’re walking, they’re flying," he says. "It’s going to be the same with music. They’re not going to come in here playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ They’re going to get into it."
Gaining the ability to express themselves through art has great therapeutic value, Mr. Lefens said, but the object of the exercise is far from mere therapy.
"The idea is to make art," he says. "And if you make it art first, you take the artist seriously, and that is 10 times more therapeutic. Whereas, if you look at it as therapy, then you’re saying, ‘There’s something wrong with you.’ We blew that away."
Using lasers and robots to enable the handicapped to paint or compose sounds like an expensive proposition, but Mr. Lefens says the machines more than pay for themselves through increased donations to the institutions in which they’re used.
"People see that the work is really dynamite, really stands on its own, and they want to help," he says. There is no definite plan for where the LASSY will be officially unveiled. Mr. Lefens needs to make it more portable and find a suitable space for it. But he says he’s confident that when he introduces the students to LASSY, it will make a big splash.
"The challenge is to get everyone to see what the possibilities are," he says. "Hopefully, they will be able to hear just what they want to hear, like a real artist."