Renowned US painter David Lenz paints people usually marginalised by society and in an exclusive interview with the Luxembourg Times spoke about his work during a visit to the country where one of his award-winning paintings now hangs.
Lenz is dedicated to painting portraits of people with disabilities, as he believes in the inherent interconnectedness of the universe and challenges the way the society reacts to people who happen to be “different”.
“The first painting I did of a person with a disability was of [my son] Sam,” Lenz said during an interview with the Luxembourg Times.
Lenz has been making portraits of different marginalized groups who have not traditionally been popular subjects of art history. He started out painting African American children in Milwaukee while collaborating with local community organisations. He then portrayed Wisconsin farm families, and has been working with people with disabilities since 2005.
“It’s what I feel I should be doing not [just] with my career but with my life,” he said.
I can paint a fuller picture of who they are and what they are up against in life.
David Lenz
His meticulous photo-realistic paintings – which can be mistaken for photographs at first sight – do not portray the subjects as victims but as people full of light and life. For Lenz it’s important to first build a relationship with his subjects to represent them fully.
“I love to include landscapes with metaphors that talk about their lives and hint at things that are important to them or the challenges that they have, and it feels to me that I can paint a fuller picture of who they are and what they are up against in life,” Lenz said.
Kindred Spirits, 2019, by David Lenz shows another marginalised group © Photo credit: Collection of the Museum of Wisconsin Art
Lenz’s most rewarding moment of this journey was back in 2006 when his son Sam, who has Down syndrome, started applauding as David’s name was announced as the winner of the grand prize of the inaugural Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, organised by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
The winning masterpiece ‘Sam and the Perfect World’ now hangs in the study of the US Embassy in Luxembourg, selected personally by ambassador Tom Barrett and his wife Kris Barrett.
Groundbreaking essay as a starting point
As part of the prize at the National Portrait Gallery, Lenz was commissioned to paint a significant figure in American history. Together with the museum, Lenz could choose anyone from American history. His pick was Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics.
“But she did so much more than that” said Lenz about Kennedy Shriver, “she really spearheaded a movement to include people with disabilities in the community. She started with her access to her brother [John F. Kennedy] who was the president of the US at the time in 1960s. They put together a presidential commission to study the issue and what could be done. You could pretty much trace back every good thing that happened to people with disabilities back to the origin of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her brother.”
Lenz’s portrait of Shriver is part of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection.
The fact that they haven’t been able to fully participate in society is tragic.
David Lenz
A 1962 essay by Shriver in Life Magazine about her sister Rosemary was “unheard of at that time to publicly talk about your sibling who had disabilities,” said Lenz. And still today, Lenz’s subjects are marginalised in the media, society and history.
“The fact that they haven’t been able to fully participate in society is tragic. It’s changed to a large extent in the US but only in the last 35 years… They lived on the margins of society. They have something to contribute,” said Lenz.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver by David Lenz, 2009, was inspired by Shriver’s fight for more social inclusion, including founding the Special Olympics © Photo credit: National Portrait Gallery; Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery as part of the First Prize, Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006
As part of his stay in Luxembourg, he visited Cooperation Wiltz, which provides opportunities for work and gainful employment to persons with disabilities. “The art that’s been done up there is amazing,” he said after the visit. “It’s a tremendous place, they have 150 people with disabilities working in the facility. They huge garden that’s been in existence since 1980s and has been maintained by people with disabilities… People from the entire region come in and pursue their artistic abilities.”
Lenz also gave an art workshop at the Association of Parents of Mentally Handicapped Children and spoke to art students on the power of art in giving voice to the voiceless at Lycée Aline Mayrisch.
It’s difficult to find anything like Lenz’s work in art history. And even for Lenz is was unusual meeting people from such different walks of life for his paintings: “Portraiture started out as portraits of noble men and women, people with power and wealth, because it was expensive to have your portrait back then… At the time when peasants were painted it was a shocking thing back then… But there just aren’t any portraits of people with disabilities.”
Art history is not doing people with disabilities justice, but one artwork can have a powerful impact on future generations. “The wonderful thing about art is that if it’s appreciated it has the potential to live on for a long time, maybe in 100 or 300 years somebody could still be looking at this painting… a little bit of immortality” he said. Lenz’s paintings certainly have this kind of potential.
