Touched by Angels : Samuel Brantley Is Passionate About Sculpture--and Helping Kids Find Their Creativity

Awise man once said that art makes us human, and if sculptor and painter Samuel Brantley had to pick a philosophy of life, that maxim would be it. Art, after all, has lifted him above his own brutal life, a strange journey that began in Virginia when he was 8, with his father killing his mother and his brother then killing his father, and culminated more recently in his own hard times after he lost the roof over his head.

At 39, the soft-spoken, gentle folk artist knows that in another time, in another town, he might just be a despairing man sitting on a street corner peddling his plywood sculptures of Gov. Pete Wilson and Drew Barrymore, or hauling around the huge wire-sculpted angels that jam his storage rental space, in hopes that some decent soul would plunk down enough money for his rent.

But this is Los Angeles, where creative wunderkinds are still “discovered” working as parking attendants and celebrity occurs in the most curious ways. Thus it was that Samuel Brantley suddenly catapulted from an unknown hawker of folk art to a darling among Hollywood industry types and other well-connected people who believe in him--and were especially moved because the down-on-his-luck artist spends some of his time teaching art to disadvantaged kids.

Indeed, next month, at the Hancock Park home of British Consul General Merrick Baker-Bates, Brantley’s art will be featured in a silent auction whose invitation list reads like a seating chart for the Golden Globes. The event is the brainchild of Kathy Eldon, an independent filmmaker; Rebecca Floeter, assistant to director Nicholas Meyer at Paramount Pictures; her husband, David Floeter, owner of the documentary company Firelight Films; Kate Rubin, an independent producer and assistant to writer-producers Dan Pyne and John Mankiewicz; Chris Conrad, writer of “Junior”; and several others. The loosely organized group hopes to finance a project they call Samuel’s Angels to enable Brantley to follow his dream of teaching art to gang members and troubled kids.

Brantley, who no longer owns a stick of furniture and lives for now in Long Beach in a friend’s extra room, can only shake his head and laugh softly. “I have these people around me now who I have to believe are my angels,” he said. “I am amazed by them, that they are somehow inspired by me. And I in turn have been deeply inspired by them.”

His change of fortune began several months ago, in a scene that might have been scripted by one of his Hollywood friends. It was a warm autumn Sunday morning, and screenwriter and filmmaker Eldon was working at her Hollywood Hills home on a script about angels, inspired in part by her son’s life in Africa.

She was thinking about her son, Dan, a young Reuters photographer who had been murdered by a mob in Somalia in 1993. She became frustrated trying to write her script about angels and headed to the Hollywood farmer’s market to buy vegetables. In her car, she passed a sign for the play “Angels in Hollywood” and thought “what a weird synchronicity.” But she really got goose bumps when she walked into the market and the first stall she saw “was filled with primitive folk art, and flying above all else were these wire angels, dipping and flying and soaring. It was absolutely ludicrous.”

Brantley, with his twirled handlebar mustache, “looked like Salvador Dali, except black, and he had his son, Cesar, there, and he started telling me all about his life, and . . . trying to make it as an artist in L.A. without selling out.”

Brantley never tried to make a sale. When Eldon tried to buy a “funny little painting that reminded me of a Chagall,” Brantley said it wasn’t for sale but eventually relented. In a decision that friends later told her was “just crazy,” Eldon invited the artist and his grade-school-aged son to her home for lunch. There, she told Brantley about her son, whose death inspired the opening of a “creativity center” for children in Kenya. Brantley in turn told her about his work with ex-gang members and at-risk kids in Long Beach, where for the past few years he has conducted art projects aimed at helping young people discover their creativity.

One day, Brantley invited Eldon to attend a morning prayer meeting of the Inner City Ministries of Long Beach, a group that helps ex-convicts and former gang members. There, Eldon met Baker-Bates, who had joined the group.

Baker-Bates recalls that Brantley was living in a house in Compton “without electricity, and they had to light oil lamps. I hadn’t seen oil lamps since I was an evacuee trying to escape the bombings in World War II.”

True to his English no-nonsense background, Baker-Bates is the one person in Brantley’s unusual new orbit who continues to argue for a foot-to-the ground approach to helping Brantley, offering him gardening work and encouraging him (so far without luck) to launch his own gardening service. “I’ve talked with Sam many times about how it’s fine to be a struggling artist. But with no income, you’d almost have to live in garrets and starve and get TB and all these things from the 18th century, to really become an artist. “

Indeed, exactly “what to do about Samuel” has become a good-natured debate among the industry people, Baker-Bates and Brantley himself. Eldon laughs about the consul general’s recommendation. “I don’t think there are more than two people among us with normal 9-to-5 jobs, so we really respect Merrick’s steadiness,” she said.

Brantley, who served in the Army in the 1970s, studied art in North Carolina and became a street artist there and later in Germany, gaining attention when he got teenagers involved in art by throwing a contest for the “world’s fastest artist.” He settled in Los Angeles several years ago, and his work was recently featured at El Pueblo Gallery on Olvera Street. But he’s had tough financial times ever since losing his booth at the farmer’s market.

On March 3, with the help of this new support group of overachievers, Brantley took a big step toward his dream of reaching out to gangbangers and other kids through art. At Geneva Presbyterian Church in Long Beach, Brantley taught an interactive art class to grade schoolers and teenage members of a tough “street crew.” The three-hour event was videotaped by David Floeter, who is editing it into a mini-documentary to show at the silent auction next month. The group hopes to attract grant money to create a permanent art outreach program taught by Brantley.

That was the first time any of Brantley’s new supporters had seen his work with children, an unusual mix of teaching art and reaching out to kids. “I call what I do with kids and with troubled young men my ‘infiltrations,’ ” Brantley said. “Sometimes it makes me sick what these young people say. So much anger from the past. But I say, ‘Hey man, let’s try something different first. First try to get really creative.’ ”

That message seemed to get through. “I could be out getting into problems, popping somebody right now but I’d really rather he in church drawing,” one teenager told the adults afterward.

Johnnie Walker, who runs the outreach program known as the Multicultural Youth Ministry Project, said those few hours had a huge effect. “These young people took a major step forward in terms of commitment that day,” Walker said.

Brantley took the racially mixed group of 20 through an exercise in which he asked them to draw in pencil a portrait of the kid sitting to their immediate right. What emerged was a series of surprisingly detailed--and telling--portraits that made some of the teenage crew members squirm.

“Why did you draw the person next to you with such light pencil lines that we can’t see it from our perspective, and only you can see it, close up?” Samuel asked one crew member. Brantley picked up the drawing and drew a dark, vibrant line along one of the teenager’s faint scratchings.

“What are you doing, man?” the teenager asked angrily. Said Brantley: “I’m wondering if you realize that the perspective of somebody else, like me, is completely different from your own. Maybe we literally cannot see what you are trying to say.”

The boy sat back, absorbing a seemingly brand-new idea.

Brantley sees himself in these kids, remembering his own “rage and hatred for all the other groups.” His art and his teaching are his lifesaver, “my overcoming of the past. And I never could give that up.”