Street Scenes : Artworks by the Homeless Find a Special Place in Charlie Colin’s Heart

There are probably few art exhibits where you can find a painting accompanied by an info card stating “Mixed Media: Lipstick, Liquid Paper and Shoe Polish.”

This choice of materials isn’t just some chic artist’s affectation.

“Here’s another one of the same artist’s painted on the back of two L.A. Kings posters,” said collector Charlie Colin, pointing to a larger work. “He paints on whatever he can, uses spray paint and shoe polish. He goes through office trash bins to get Wite-Out. When he uses charcoal, it’s not like art stores have; it’s charcoal briquettes.”

This artist, Ralph Middleton, and some 25 others whose work Colin collects are homeless. For the past three years the 27-year-old musician and artist has been combing the streets of downtown Los Angeles, befriending homeless artists and collecting some 200 of their works.

Fifty of those will be displayed at Triangle Square in a vacant storefront next to the Susan Spiritus Gallery, opening Sunday at a “Jazz Fest” held at the shopping center to benefit Share Our Selves (Call (714) 538-8276 for information; the exhibit remains there until Nov. 15.). The Costa Mesa-based charity provides assistance and medical care for needy people in the county.

Some of the artworks address the harshness of street life. Some are about the artist’s personal predicaments. Some are dreamscapes. All manner of scavenged materials are used. Whatever else might be said of the paintings’ efficacy as art, Wite-Out certainly creates some haunting eyes.

Colin might not seem the obvious choice for someone to be championing the art of society’s discarded. He was raised in Newport, was on the water polo team at Newport Harbor High, and got his higher education at Boston’s Berklee School of Music and USC. His mile-a-minute speech is unclouded by cynicism or doubt.

He points out, though, that one of the homeless artists whose work he’s collected had been a Newport High teammate in water polo and a 4.0 student who experienced mental problems that left him wandering the streets of Laguna for two years.

“It was a real shock to see him living like that, but it brought home to me that it could be any of us,” Colin said. “Most of these people avoid giving you their stories, but there are some who will tell you they’re out there by choice.

“There’s one named Jackson-Collins for instance. He makes no apologies for being on the street. He chose it. He was an econ major at USC, had a live-in relationship with a family, was doing graphic art. He decided his talent was being wasted, that he wasn’t being true to the gifts he was given. So he left his job and family and decided to live on the street. That’s where he gets all his ideas, so he figured he should be there. He says his paintings are from ‘Real Life Studios.’

“Right across from the L.A. County Museum (of Art) there is a billboard which is backed by a wall. He has a sleeping bag and mat there. It’s like his apartment. He goes to Fairfax, paints all day, makes enough to by his supplies and some food. He doesn’t call himself homeless. He says he’s an urban camper.”

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Colin began seeking such artists out after roaming L.A. looking for graffiti art to use for an album cover project. “I had done a lot of traveling and was interested in this graffiti and mural art I saw wherever I went. In each country it seemed to address the same basic human needs and problems. It can be socially poignant, and the artists doing it know it might get painted over the next day. I started going out with a camera to record how some walls changed from day to day. Some of my favorite murals, I found, were done by homeless artists,” he said.

The first one he met, Middleton, lives in the abandoned Red Car station at L.A.’s 2nd Street and Beaudry Avenue. Though he considers him a gifted artist, Colin said that after visiting him some 150 times, Middleton still can’t remember his name.

“I started calling the area where he stays the neutral zone, because there’s this giant seven-foot wall that has been completely covered by graffiti. The gangs seem to have a truce there to let everybody do their art.”

Colin pointed to a painting of Middleton’s of two youths playing with guns. They have rounded, peanut-shaped heads and lost Liquid Paper eyes. One wears a look of glee while the other appears deeply befuddled by the gun in his hands.

Colin said: “Here’s gang members with guns. It’s not just a negative depiction. He lives with these people. They’re his friends; they help take care of him. He has no quarrel with them; he just sees it as being too bad, this situation where 12-year-olds have guns.

“I went down to see Ralph one time, and I saw these kids probably no older than 10. . . . They were taking huge hits from this bag filled with nail polish and glue, just completely gone, and they were messing around with guns.”

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Dressed down in his own paint-splattered clothes, Colin roamed the streets of downtown L.A., eventually becoming acquainted with some 50 artists, though he only collects the work of half of them. Some of their works have been gifts to him; for most he has paid between $10 and $300. He also often brings them art supplies.

“It takes a long time to develop trust,” he said. “I’ve had to work on some of these relationships for six or seven months. And I’ve been very delicate about acquiring the art and taking it from them, because when you have literally nothing, the few possessions you do have have a great importance. Some persons may have a wadded-up napkin in their shopping cart and if you were to remove that, they’d go ballistic, because that might be the napkin that was under the wine glass of the last normal meal with their daughter.”

One of the homeless he encountered in L.A. was David, a Fixations subject last year, who was long a fixture on Orange County street corners with his cryptic, questioning religious signs. Colin considers his “signs art,” for their thought-provoking qualities.

He tries to collect several pieces from each artist. “I want to be able to show the artist as a complete person. Some of their works are so compelling in the disturbing feeling they give of homelessness, but there are also blissful, hopeful ones. Some are quite aggressive and angry in addressing their particular circumstance--people being shot or eating out of garbage cans--then sometimes they’ll be in a purely artistic phase painting their dreams and ideas. It seems to me that much of the art by homeless people has nothing to do with being homeless whatsoever. It’s about being alive.”

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Colin has had a downtown studio where he let some of the artists work for a while and would like to organize a location where the artists could regularly work. Living on the street means they rarely have more than a day to work on a piece, Colin said, because that work might well get lost by the next day. He’s looking into getting a nonprofit status to set up such a studio and to find further ways to display their art.

“My favorite book when I was young was ‘The Family of Man,’ and I’d like to put together something like that with this art,” he said. He was able to get some of the pieces displayed at a reception for Comic Relief. He’s never offered any of his collection for sale but says that if he did, most of the proceeds would be funneled back to the artists.

“Some of these people are so committed to their art,” he said. “They may not know where their next meal is coming from, but they’ll spend what little money they get on art supplies, or they’re out scavenging things they can adapt.

“It’s inspiring to me, but also it’s kind of embarrassing because some of these artists work with nothing and are so resourceful and prolific under the most trying circumstances and under complete duress. And I have to have my studio and materials and everything has to be just perfect for me to paint. So I’ve been really humbled by them.”

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Some of the artists he deals with are clearly mentally ill, but he doesn’t feel that diminishes their validity as artists, and certainly not the importance of them doing art. “I’m positive about it. I think there’s nothing better than for a mentally troubled person than to express themselves through a medium such as art that doesn’t have boundaries, where anything is OK and you can draw anything you feel and it’s your version of reality. Just the process of doing that shows they have feelings and attitudes they want to express, which is saying they want to be understood or improve.”

“A lot of the artists validate themselves with their art. You can see they have pride and respect for themselves and just have trouble functioning within the confines of our society. It doesn’t mean that renders them completely helpless or that they don’t want to be appreciated for what they can do.”