Art of Recycling : Charles Gordio is teaching abused children that they have the power to craft objets d’art from objets d’trash.

Charles Gordio heated up his glue gun and issued a challenge to his young artists: “Do you want it to say something or do you just want to make a collage?”

The two little girls he was addressing didn’t pay much heed, instead sorting through a stack of 3-by-5-foot mounted photos from a discarded store display. They continued going through the pile with no particular sense of focus until Gordio made a suggestion no child could ignore:

“How about if we put a bunch of eyeballs on this?”

For the next hour, Gordio worked with the two girls, age 6 and 7, from a local shelter for abused children. One lost interest and wandered away to sing through a microphone, while the other completed a wall-sized collage.

Three afternoons a week, Gordio, 34, enthusiastically shows abused children how to take trash and turn it into art. He then spends his Monday nights teaching the ins and outs of the fashion industry to “at-risk” kids from a Huntington Beach neighborhood where gang activity is one of their only other options. Gordio does all this of his own volition and with no outside funding.

Gordio is something of a Jack of all arts. He makes most of his income from doing portfolio and fashion photography, but he also, among other things, makes art furniture, produces fashion shows, designs videos, builds stage sets, records music, started modeling and talent agencies, and presently runs the Arts and Grinds Cultural Studio, a multipurpose “Paris-style” artists’ space and coffee emporium on Adams Avenue.

It is there that children from the county’s Orangewood Children’s Home and Childhelp U.S.A. are brought to play with trash. Rather than use coffee grounds or banana peels, Gordio goes for classy trash, with much of the raw material being old store displays and equipment donated by Nordstrom.

One week the kids might piece together an amoeba-shaped coffee table out of mosaic-like ceramic chunks. Another week it might be fanciful robots made from old IBM computers they tore apart. Another week it’s artsy stools or small tables. Except for the most unwieldy pieces, the finished art goes home with them.

Gordio’s one-man program appears to be working on several fronts. For Stephen Terry, environmental projects coordinator with the South Coast Plaza Nordstrom, “Charles’ program is great, because he’s helping people by making usable pieces of art from stuff of ours, like displays and old computers, that is very difficult to recycle into raw materials and would definitely wind up in a landfill otherwise.”

According to Rick Bazant, community programs specialist with Orangewood, which has sent about 60 of its 214 children to Gordio so far, “We think it’s great. Charles is so enthusiastic that the kids have become really motivated by the idea of taking something that may be considered a useless discard and finding something more in it, and to make that happen themselves.”

To Bazant, there’s a metaphor implicit in the recycled art.

“What the kids are pulling out of it is that they have the ability to control their environment, that they can take something no one else wants and make it into something of worth. Maybe they feel unwanted themselves, and making this art can show them self-esteem. The children here may have more problems with self-esteem or personal expression than children who haven’t been through the traumas they have, and this definitely has been a way for them to learn to better express themselves.”

Working with both the 7-year-old artists and the young teens learning modeling and fashion, Gordio seemed tireless, plugging into those ages and drawing the most out of the youths. Doing the art, he’d hunker down on the floor with the children, sparking them with his own sense of play, and then standing back to let them run with their own ideas.

In the Monday night fashion session Gordio took each of the six girls--as self-conscious and standoffish as is common of their age--down a catwalk repeatedly, showing, by example, how to walk with a model’s poise.

Gordio doesn’t lack self-confidence. He motivates and talks such a fabulous pitch that one suspects he could be a great scam artist if he were so inclined.

“I know how to make money and I know about that dark side,” he said. “But I’ve come to believe that if you put good out there you get good back. I’ve got a real strong inner power, and I don’t want to use it to make money. We may have to survive on it, but I personally think money is evil. I’ve been given some gifts, and I can either make money off them and lose touch with people--you see that all the time because corruption and greed set in--or I can be more of a spiritual person.”

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Orange County, Gordio said: “I’ve known how to make things out of trash most of my life because we were poor. My father was in the construction field, so I could swing a hammer at a young age. I’m the type of person who has never liked going out and buying other people’s work. I like to make my own stuff, cut my own hair, design my own things.”

Gordio took business classes in college, but dropped out because the texts meant nothing to him. Instead, he learned by starting his own businesses, studying photography and his other skills on his own.

Eighteen months ago, Gordio was producing a fashion show and had the idea of letting abused and battered children see the behind-the-scenes production, so they could experience the work that went into a finished show and learn the rudiments of the fashion business. A group of children from Orangewood was brought down, but officials decided it was a bit overwhelming for the youngsters.

He then began working on the idea of teaching them to recycle through art, and put the one-man program into operation four months ago. He since has shifted teaching fashion to the older youths, covering the field from modeling to production.

Gordio is continually hatching ideas, including several programs to teach children to run their own service-oriented businesses. He plans to start one called Gangland Style Inc.--similar to what he’s doing with the “at-risk” youths--to turn gang members into fashion entrepreneurs.

He says: “My son is 7 years old. By the time he’s 15 he’ll be running his own business, because I’m always teaching him how. I try to show kids how to attack a situation so that they can make themselves a good livelihood. I think we need to push more entrepreneurs out there.”

Rather than churn out young beeper-bound executives, Gordio said he is trying to instill a sense of individuality and self-worth in the youths.

“I think self-esteem is everything in a person’s life. Toward that end, it’s very important they know they can finish something. Most of our children think in 30- to 60-second sound bites, and they’re being bombarded with so much advertising telling them to do it all want it all, have it all, be it all, so they just start grabbing for everything. Then they become so overwhelmed by all the things that they end up doing nothing. I see so much of that.

“I don’t discipline the kids at all. I don’t raise my voice. I just get their attention back onto what we were doing. If they don’t want to, I say, ‘OK, let’s try something else, but if we start it we’re going to finish it.’ ”

One work-in-progress in his studio is a gold-painted cracked Styrofoam globe, that he intends to pour more Styrofoam into and have kids carve faces into it. He had the globe cracked by one child who had a problem with breaking things in the home.

“So her first day here, I asked her to help me break some stuff. ‘You mean you want me to break this?’ ‘Yeah, I want you to break it!’ ‘Are you going to yell at me? ‘No, break it for me. Now, let me show you what we’re going to do with this.’

“I hear now from the home that she’s broken the habit she had of breaking things for no purpose. Now she wants to break things for a purpose,” Gordio laughed, “so she can do something with it after it’s broken.”

Heidi Schnell, “prevention educator” with the Irvine-based nonprofit Community Service Programs Inc. that deals with gangs and other youth problems for the city of Huntington Beach, said Gordio has also had a positive effect on the girls, age 12 to 14, he’s been instructing in fashion. Schnell knows the statistics facing gang wanna-bes--that most will wind up in jail or dead by age 19--and she’s had to deal with other kids being shot.

“He’s giving them something to aspire to, something positive to focus on. These kids can do so much if you show them something different. But there are so many negatives in their life. A lot of kids never see anything worth doing in their neighborhood, and there’s not an abundance of role models for them. I think Charles really cares about the kids. He’s genuinely concerned for their future,” she said.

Monday, Gordio worked the girls hard, but also gave them inducements, showing a video of a fashion show and pointing out, “That’s what you’re doing, except they’re getting $400 a day for it.” A somewhat more immediate goal is a community fashion show Schnell and the girls are planning for December, in which they’ll model folkloric garb from the various Mexican states.

Later, asked what they thought of him, all six girls agreed, “He’s cool!”

Said one, Letty Herrera, “We’re learning better things here than to be hanging out in the streets, which is where I’d be if we weren’t here.”

A few days earlier, when Gordio was working on the recycled art with the children, one of them took a pen and started gouging savage rents across a face in a photograph. It could have just been childish rambunctiousness, but given that she’d been removed from a situation of familial abuse, it seemed overwhelmingly sad.

But Gordio wasn’t disturbed by the action.

“For me these things are never heartbreaking because I think into the future, of what they could become and where they can take what I’m doing with them now. Personally, I don’t think in the past or the present. I only think in the future. I don’t dwell on any bad experiences I’ve ever been through, so I don’t think about it for others either. I don’t identify with their aggression or any of that.

“I try to go beyond that and give them some other things to think about, show them that there are other ways of thinking. That’s the button I’m looking to push. I dabble in the present, because I have to be here, but I think in the future 24 hours a day. That’s why I come up with these ambitious ideas that could make it or maybe not. I really don’t care. I’m just going to be out there doing it.”