It all started with rain-soaked wheelchair tire treads that patterned across the driveway of Jeremy Bigelow’s Holland home.
“I was driving through puddles in my driveway one day, and seeing the tracks all over the place, and I thought it would be cool to somehow paint my tires and put it on canvas,” said Bigelow, a quadriplegic since he injured his spinal cord in a car crash in 2010.
That revelation might have been the catalyst for a burgeoning art career that Bigelow says he never expected when this whole adventure began, but those closest to him would say it’s his attitude that propelled him into the Toledo area’s creative scene.
“He has always been really positive, always wanting to motivate people. Always,” says Ani Geha, a Whiteford Elementary art teacher and the person who has been creating art with Bigelow since his first project in 2013.
“My teaching philosophy is really how can I teach kids to help other people through art. All my students learn about Jeremy and his struggles, and how fortunate they are to have their bodies working, and how not to take things for granted,” she said.
Bigelow has a group of family and friends who help with his abstract work, No Limit Arts, which is on exhibit at the Sanger Branch of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library through Jan. 30.
A Life Changing Event
Everything changed on Oct. 3, 2010, for Bigelow, an active, athletic man who played football and hockey in high school, and ran marathons before the accident.
He and four friends were on a rain-slicked road in the Columbus area that day, when Bigelow, 26 at the time, lost control of the vehicle and the car flipped three times. His friends walked away with minor injuries, but the roof of the car caved in on Bigelow, fracturing his spinal cord and rendering him paralyzed from the shoulders down.
While he spent the better part of a year in rehab facilities, Bigelow’s father, Brad Bigelow, and his grandfather, began rehabbing a house they bought in Holland.
It was a learning curve for Bigelow, now 35, who said he did a lot of soul-searching and praying to figure out his life path. What did he like to do that he could still do? he asked himself.
“One of the best things someone told me after the accident, a friend said ‘You’re still going to be able to do the things you loved to do before, it’s just going to be different, a different way of doing things.’ Which I embraced.”
Innovative Art
To maneuver his way through life, Bigelow uses a motorized wheelchair called a Sip and Puff Chair, that uses variations of air pressure that he blows through a tube to move.
It wasn’t until that day in the driveway that he realized the chair could be an artistic tool as well.
Bigelow teamed up with Geha, an old family friend, to create some pieces for some upcoming benefits to help fund his physical therapy needs. She helped him with the things he couldn’t physically do himself: priming the canvas, attaching adaptive equipment to his chair, putting the brushes and straws that he uses to blow paint in his mouth, and painting the treads of his wheelchair tires.
The rest, she said, is all him, from the colors he chooses for a piece to the patterns he decides he wants.
“We first did it to put something together to help raise funds .. and people were just ranting and raving about it and I thought, OK, that’s some cool feedback. Then people wanted one, specific ones, and we just started doing new things and my ideas started flowing,” Bigelow recalled.
The first year he experimented with the tread pattern his tires made on the canvas. That evolved into ways to use his mouth to blow paint onto the piece, and different things he could drag across the canvas to achieve distinctive patterning.
His methodology resulted in a few inventions, including a piece of equipment he and his father created that fits under Bigelow’s feet and allows him to attach large brushes and brooms to the end that sweep across his canvases.
“Every year, it’s how to be innovative and change the way I’m able to paint, the different techniques, and adaptations and modifications to my chair,” he said. “Anything I can attach to my chair, I want to use to make cool patterns.”
Creative Opportunities
His first show was part of the downtown Sylvania Red Bird Art Walk in 2016. Last year, he participated in several community art shows, including Maple & Main in Sylvania, the Wild About Art show at the Toledo Zoo, and Art on the Mall at the University of Toledo.
Bigelow said through commissions and art show sales, he now sells about 50 pieces annually.
The Ohio Arts Council offers monetary grants of between $500 and $1,000 to artists with disabilities through its Artists with Disabilities Access Program.
The funding can go toward anything from seeing a physical project to fruition to attending workshops, buying supplies or creating a website, said Donna Collins, executive director of the OAC.
Despite the ADAP’s specific designation, artists with disabilities are eligible for all of the Art Council’s grant programs, she said.
“All of us have the ability to be creative. Some of us [have] enough to be artists and many make their livelihood creating art,” Collins said. “We believe one way we can support those artists with disabilities is to provide some funding through the ADAP program.”
All of the proceeds from Bigelow’s artwork go to fund his physical therapy. The artist travels twice a week for three-hour sessions at Walk the Line to SCI (Spinal Cord Injuries) Recovery in Southfield, Mich. Those sessions, which cost him about $50,000 a year, are not something that is covered by insurance.
There are about 17,500 new spinal cord injuries each year in the United States, and between 245,000 and 353,000 Americans were estimated to be living with such an injury in 2017, according to spinalcord.com, a website hosted by a team of spinal cord injury experts.
Removing the Barriers
Bigelow has bigger aspirations: to fund spinal cord injury research, and to fix a broken government system that he says doesn’t help those with disabilities who want to be productive members of a community. He and some friends started SCI Connect two years ago. They meet monthly to discuss issues surrounding their injuries, and encourage each other to get involved in the community.
For the last few years, Bigelow has been traveling to area schools with Geha. He tells his story to children in third grade through high school, and does art demonstrations for the students. Recently, he talked to art therapy students at the University of Toledo.
“It’s not just a piece of artwork he’s creating, it tells so much more about the things you can overcome,” said Mackenzie Coughlan, Bigelow’s girlfriend of two years who goes to art shows with him. “He can still express himself through this, which I think is amazing.”
In his personal life, he has goals as well, always with the mind-set that nothing is impossible.
“I’ve been scuba diving, I’ve shot a deer — I hunt,” he said of his post-accident life. He and Coughlan plan to be certified in scuba diving, and go skiing in the winter through Michigan Adaptive Sports. He has also taught sled hockey locally, another adaptive sport, and is helping Coughlan train for a half-marathon by accompanying her on local bike trails.
In the end, he wants more people to be aware of a thriving community of people with spinal cord injuries.
“I want to have a larger voice and influence as many people as I can, because I don’t want people to be afraid of people in chairs, or be hesitant on how to treat someone in a chair. No different,” he said. “That’s why I like to speaks at schools to kids — even adults — about that, about overcoming adversity and always having a positive mindset and believing in yourself.”
His artwork will continue to be an inroad for that message.
“For spinal cord injuries everywhere, I think this is a great way to tell a story, and create some really cool things along the way,” he said.
Roberta Gedert
The Blade
