Portraits of the Faceless : Artist Creates ‘Family Album’ of Santa Ana Homeless

They look like ordinary people, but there’s something extra in their eyes.

They look back at you from their charcoal portraits, their gazes fixed but filled with--what is it? Confusion? Sadness? Resentment? Boredom?

You turn to their handwritten statements, and the faces begin to speak:

To Whom It May Concern I been homeless since 1987 and I don’t want to be anymore. Mentel Lillness Wood it or wouldn’t it happen to you. Please it is not a Joke. On the Street On the street is being alone. No perment address, no mail box, no mail. Cold, hungry, and discusted. Hopeing it will not rain. Some day better, some better, maybe money to wash your clothes, maybe not. A few friends that can be trusted, some you can not. . . . (signed) Worn Wisdom

They are Santa Ana’s homeless speaking about the gritty life on the streets. And Jeff Horn, whose portraits are usually commissioned by Orange County’s well-to-do, has been out there for seven months, trying to put a face on homelessness.

“These are all individuals,” says Horn, an art instructor at Irvine Valley College. “To be simplistic about how you treat the issue is impossible. They have their own histories and their own particular problems that brought them where they are.

“Half of these are the homeless mentally ill. But half are not; they are just people on the street. Meeting them, drawing them, has been absolutely fascinating.”

He begins to flip through his portfolio, adopting the tone of someone narrating a family album.

“This is one of the nicest individuals I’ve ever met. They call him Big. He’s kind of the father protector of a lot of the street people in Santa Ana. His story, which I believe, is his wife left, he lost his family and he’s sort of taken on these people in the street as his extended family. He could make it in society easily. He’s a prince of a gentleman.”

Another page. Herbert. So schizophrenic he’s almost infantile.

Will. Spent his savings in a losing fight against his wife’s cancer. Has some sort of respiratory disease.

Darren. A very rough childhood. Now he simmers with resentment. “He’s a little frightening. I don’t know, he seems kind of volatile. But as I drew him, I made the comment, ‘I’m not going away, I’m not going anywhere,’ and he welled up with tears in his eyes. That phrase or something caught him off guard. He’s kind of childlike in a lot of ways.”

Hattie. Toothless in her 60s, good-natured, mentally ill. “When she looked at her portrait, she slapped the table and said, ‘If that’s not a loony, I’ll kiss your ass.’ That’s refreshing, really. How many women in Irvine or wherever would look at a portrait of themselves and say succinctly, ‘Well, isn’t that a picture of a nouveau riche?’ ”

Horn concedes that he was naive when he first started drawing portraits of the homeless.

“There’s a historical precedent for drawing the, quote, hobo or tramp in our American art history. People in the past have done that. You know, ‘weathered faces laden with the effects of time.’ But for me it’s kind of grown beyond that.

“You realize when you sit with one of these people, it’s not the romantic, vagabond sort of existence. There’s really no freedom involved in it. What this has turned into is giving them a human face for the rest of us who see a pile of rags on the sidewalk and step over it. To realize that when we look at these faces, we see something of ourselves.”

Early on, Horn began handing his subjects a sheet of paper and asking them to write a statement, anything at all. Most complied.

“The statements, they’re powerful, but sometimes they don’t make a whole lot of sense,” Horn says.

Some are incomprehensible--series of numbers, mystic symbols or run-on sentences. Some are merely my-name-is-Joe-and-blue-is-my-favorite-color.

But others are poignant, revealing and compelling.

One woman praises volunteers who have helped her:

They are the light at the end of the tunnel. . . . These people realize that we need to be shown we’re just as worthy of love and anyone else. . . . The strength of the delicate webbthey help us start is the very begining that makes the difference. God holds a very special place in Heaven for these selfless people that start with near to nothing but their own heart . . .

But one young man is filled with rage:

I think all the CHURCHES should help the Homeless, not just Santa Ana, not just Orange County, not just California, but the entire United States, from the smallest to the largest, to the poorest to the richest, the churches of the 20th Century are too damned selfish, they worry too much about impressing everybody, they had it too damned easy, they grew up in Happy Normal Families, they Hate and Fear people like us.

An older man’s statement is as cool as a government report, the lines perfectly straight, the letters small and neat:

Having spent 25 years as a social worker, I have had the opportunity to observe homelessness from both sides of the desk. While I cannot blame society for my own situation, I do feel that most of our social ills are the results of topsey-turvy priorities. The S&L; and HUD scandals are examples of privatization of profit and socialization of loss. When their full impact hits our economy, I believe many more will be enlisted into the ranks of the homeless.

One young man--brutalized all his life, yet known on the street for his gentleness and generosity--labored two hours to complete a three-line statement. It is so poorly spelled and drawn that it requires translation. Yet, Horn says, it strikes him deeper than any other he’s read:

Well, I think that my life is fine, but I think being homeless is bad for everyone out here. It is tough out here and lonely not just for me. It’s hard to see my friends be hurt. I know that I don’t mean much by doing some things I do at times.

Horn said he was attracted to the homeless as subjects when a college colleague described her volunteer work at the Episcopal Service Alliance center at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah.

The quaint, 103-year-old church still stands on its original site in downtown Santa Ana, and the ESA center, situated off a tidy, picturesque brick courtyard, offers free lunch and aid to street people four days a week.

Horn began seeking subjects there and at the Lighthouse, a nearby drop-in center for the mentally ill, not knowing how the street people would react.

“The clients just love it,” says Pam Cole, ESA’s program manager. “They just love it, because a lot of these people never had this much attention in their lives. They’ve never had that much positive attention.

“I used to take pictures of the clients and give them a copy. I’ve had people who have never, ever had a copy of a snapshot of themselves given to them. The only time they ever had a picture taken was when they were taken to the police station.

“But with Jeff, he does the portrait, gives them Xerox copies to send to friends, and they like it.

“And it’s become a whole lot more. It’s something that’s set us apart from the other agencies. It’s something fun. And I think it’s given Jeff some insight into the human tragedy of why some of these guys are here.

“I mean, you don’t just wake up one day on the street. It takes a while to get here. There’s that myth out that these people are just recently laid off from Rockwell or something. A lot of these people have been on the street six, seven, eight years. A lot of these people are very sick--physically, mentally.”

On this particular day, Horn is in one of the church’s classrooms drawing a portrait of A.J., a young black man who brings with him a wrestler doll and an American eagle stuffed toy. Around A.J.’s neck is a gold-colored chain with a monkey figurine.

“What’s the significance of the monkey?” Horn asks.

“I found it this morning,” says A.J.

He says he’s from Philadelphia but likes California better--only because the weather’s less harsh. He doesn’t mind sitting for a portrait, he says. “I used to have my picture taken a lot. I used to model for GQ.”

But he’s sleepy, he says. “Been up all night canning.” Visions of fruit in Mason jars fill Horn’s imagination, and he’s puzzled. No, says A.J., canning, as in combing trash bins for cans to sell.

Horn says he’ll try to draw quickly.

Two hours later when the sitting is over, Horn asks A.J. to sign a model’s release. It will permit Horn to publish or sell the portrait. A.J.’s payment is the batch of Xerox copies Horn immediately runs off for him. Any money made from the portraits will be divided between Horn and the two homeless agencies, ESA and the Lighthouse, he says.

Selling them is exactly what Horn and Cole have in mind.

“That’s why Lynn, the toothpaste lady, came in,” says Cole. Lynn Headley of Irvine is one of ESA’s volunteers and a former art gallery director. This day she had brought some toothpaste samples to give out.

“We’re hoping to have a show, so we have to locate a place,” Cole says. (Should be no problem, says Headley.) “Then we want someone, like a catering company, to donate food. We have a street client who’s a brilliant musician, and we have visions of him tinkering on the keys in the background like he did at our luncheon.”

The originals, about 60 of them, would be up on the walls and for sale. “And we could have calendar books made up with a face for each week or each month. Or postcards. Now think about these portraits on postcards. Nice, eh? And we could sell those, because a lot of people buy postcards. I do. That postcard of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, you know, is practically a collector’s item. I went out and bought a couple of dozen of them.”

Perhaps an address book would be good, Horn suggests.

Beg pardon, but isn’t Orange County more interested in keeping street people out of sight than hanging pictures of them on the walls?

“Well, we hope to make it one of these things that they almost feel they have to do because it’s such a chic thing,” Cole says.

Horn says he approached the Smithsonian Institution about including the portraits in its traveling exhibition program. They’re interested, Horn says.

All this is months off, probably not before fall, Cole says, but she’s certain that Horn’s portraits will eventually become more than pages in his portfolio.

“They could become a social document, and you know, there is a need for that.”