Art Group Auction: Color It White : Homeless: The works of 30 local artists will be sold off. Proceeds will help buy milk for children at Venice shelter.

A group of artists, health care workers and others have joined to buy milk for the growing number of homeless children on the Westside.

The group calls itself Art for Milk. Its logo, designed by founding artist William Forrest of Santa Monica, is a cow branded with a painter’s palette.

Friday night, the work of more than 30 local artists, including such notables as Gronk and George Herms, will be auctioned at Schwartz Cierlak Gallery in Santa Monica. The proceeds will be used to buy milk for the Bible Tabernacle in Venice. The largest private shelter on the Westside, the Bible Tabernacle houses up to 160 children a night, some in church-owned apartments, others on cots and mats in the church building. As many as 300 people a night sleep in the pews and on the floor of the Venice church.

According to Art for Milk co-chairman John Babiak, the group’s first auction last year raised $17,000, enough to provide two glasses of milk a day for children and pregnant women at the shelter. The money also buys infant formula, said Babiak, head of marketing for a local biotechnology firm.

Forrest said he, his wife and friends formed the group after they learned that the shelter was having trouble keeping its refrigerators full of milk for its growing number of infants and children. According to co-chairman David Wood, a pediatrician who surveyed homeless families in Los Angeles in 1987, there are about 10,000 children among the county’s 35,000 homeless. More than half of the children in the 10 local shelters surveyed were under 5, Wood said.

Forrest said that many local artists understand the seriousness of the homeless problem. “Many of them who are here in Venice see the homeless all the time,” said Forrest, conjuring up the image of the homeless looking for coins outside some of the fashionable restaurants in the area. Forrest also noted that many artists have felt the pinch of poverty themselves. “Most artists barely scratch out a living,” he said. “A lot of these artists are from East L.A. They know what poverty is like.”

Forrest said that the homeless are “not just people who have trouble with alcohol and drugs,” as much of the public seems to think. “Imagine how close we all are to homelessness,” he said.

Elizabeth Forrest explained that their young son Zak had a genetic disorder that generated enormous medical bills and that, after Forrest lost his job as art director of a greeting-card company, the family was face-to-face with the prospect of homelessness. “We went through all our savings, all our money,” she said. They survived “only because we have a supportive family that brought over meals for months.”

Wood, who is on the staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and provides pediatric services to the Venice shelter, said that milk is especially important for homeless children. Their diets tend to be more deficient than those of other poor children in foods like milk and fresh vegetables--foods that parents living in a car or on the street have no place to store properly.

“Milk is the centerpiece of the child’s diet,” Wood said. “It can satisfy 100% of the child’s nutritional needs for the first year, and it’s the most important part of a child’s diet, certainly through 5 years of age.”

Wood said that few infants in shelters are breast-fed, which increases the need for milk and baby formula.

One of the many negative consequences of homelessness on children, Wood said, is that parents are less able to take advantage of public health and nutritional services. They often lose access to such services when they lose a permanent address. “Things that would be difficult for poor people are much more difficult for homeless, poor people because of the greater complexity of their lives,” he said.

The Art for Milk cow will be on the block Friday night, as will a Herms clock called “Art for Milk Time.” A few of the artists will be reimbursed for framing costs, but virtually all of the proceeds will go to pay the dairy that delivers milk to the shelter, the group said. The auction, which will be silent, is from 7 to 10 p.m. at 3015 Main St.

Babiak, whose parents and older siblings experienced hunger in European displaced-persons camps, said he would like to see the group go national. Meanwhile, he said, there is much more to do in Los Angeles. “We have a list of needy shelters. There are children there, and we can expand.”

Wood noted that the homeless children need more than milk. “If we get more money this year,” he said, “we’ll probably expand to diapers.”