Art teacher honors colleague with a custom portrait

Famous for his handmade beads and for a giant foil ball, an English teacher is now immortalized in the halls VERNON — This is George Lightcap’s 29th, and last, year of teaching. He’s done most of that in the Vernon Township School District, where he is well-known and beloved by many. Any of the 3,000 students he has taught over those years know he is not an ordinary teacher. But those who know him say that to call him “unique” doesn’t quite capture the spirit he brings to the classroom. For example, when Vernon High teacher and artist Erik Villanueva wanted to draw a portrait using a new paisley technique he was perfecting (lots of unique little scrolls that together create a portrait) he wanted to find someone who would be best represented by the paisley pattern. George Lightcap immediately jumped to mind — not just because he still has something of a hippie air about him with his John Lennon glasses, white beard and long white hair pulled back most often. But because of the “Murray Beads” he is famous for making and giving away. Villanueva completed a portrait of Lightcap that will hang in the high school library, alongside his other portraits of notables Albert Einstein, Bob Marley, Jack Nicholson and Willie Nelson. Local celebrity Lightcap is famous not only for his kindness and effectiveness in the classroom, especially with students who are barely motivated. He is also widely known and appreciated for what he calls his Murray Beads. Over the last 12 years, Lightcap estimates that he has made and given away 36,000 beads, most to students, most strung on a cord to wear as a necklace. He said he started giving beads to students as awards more than a decade ago, but didn’t give away too many because it was getting too expensive. Then he admired the beads a student was wearing. When he asked her where she had gotten them, her reply started a trend. “I made them,” the student told Lightcap. And that led to his hobby as a bead maker. He got her recipe — she used Sculpey, a modeling medium available at hobby stores — and from that moment, Lightcap has made his own colorful beads to give away. Much like Lightcap himself, these are no ordinary beads. Each one is a multi-colored bauble; little explosions of yellows veined with red, green laced with brown, orange and red and blue...the list of colors and combinations goes on and on. Which is where the paisley connection comes in. The genesis of the name Murray is nearly as famous as the beads. Many years ago, Lightcap’s sixth-graders began their own recycling program, in a way. They collected all of their clean aluminum foil from their lunches and began to roll them in a ball. That ball, which the students dubbed “Murray,” now weighs over 300 pounds as students have continued adding to it year after year. Murray sits enthroned in Lightcap’s classroom and even has a Facebook page with more than 600 friends. The Murray beads mirror the shape — and spirit — of the aluminum sphere, so the two have become inextricably linked. Other interests Lightcap has always been torn between his love for his students and his passion for the outdoors. He is looking forward to completing the last 700 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Calling himself a “section” hiker, he has already hiked 1,500 miles, from Maine to Virginia, doing it a section at a time. Lightcap always tries to get students out on the trail in Vernon, to pass on to them an appreciation of the majesty and value of nature. His colleague, the teacher Erik Villanueva is an accomplished artist who cannot be pinned down to any one style or medium. When he decided upon Lightcap as a subject, he snapped a photo of him and began with a pencil drawing. The result, when viewed from afar, is so quintessentially George Lightcap, anyone who knows him expects the figure to begin speaking. But up close, the intricate scrolls swirl delicately over the white page in what can only be described as a breathtaking mixture of math and magic, measured restraint and wild fancy.