Compassion colors Santa Monica therapist’s portraits of the homeless

When he heads to the beach from his Santa Monica home, Stuart Perlman wears paint-spattered jeans, a plaid shirt over a T-shirt and a black wool Stetson to shade his bearded face.

With one hand he rolls a plastic crate piled high with paints, brushes, a portable easel and a yellow-and-white-striped beach umbrella. In the other, he totes plastic bags filled with containers of homemade pastas and soups, gifts for his “regulars.”

Perlman is a psychologist. In his spare time he paints faces — of individuals that most people look past. Over the last two years, his forceful brush strokes have captured the angst and mettle of dozens of homeless people along Venice Beach.

PHOTOS: Painting portraits in Venice

As he paints, occasionally against the backdrop of a beach-side knife fight or drug deal, he slips into the role of itinerant therapist. “I want to hear about your life,” he says. Before long, the posers reveal details of lost loves, thwarted dreams and battles with addiction.

Take Daniel, whose portrait conveys weariness and loss. The onetime workaholic’s world crumbled a dozen years ago when a drunk driver killed his wife and children.

Or “Doc,” whose image suggests anxiety and struggle. The former mental health care worker gave his worldly goods to a daughter seven years ago and headed west from Arkansas.

And Aftin, a moon-faced 20-year-old whose painting captures her neon-hued plumage and sun-scorched skin. She professes to be happier bunking down outdoors with other self-described “travelers” than being bored back home in Tennessee.

These wandering souls have touched Perlman’s heart and reminded him of life’s fragility.

“People are people,” Perlman said. “We’re all them, and they’re all us. We’re all one thin line from being traumatized and homeless.”

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Perlman took up painting seriously about five years ago after his father died. He took art classes at Santa Monica College and a YWCA.

With a budding artist’s perspective, he began to scrutinize the homeless people he encountered near his home and his West Los Angeles office. In their weathered faces, he sensed stories that needed telling. As a psychologist, he thought, he could reveal these forgotten souls to others as a reminder that “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Perlman, who counsels trauma survivors, had to spend months persuading distrustful people to sit for him. “They thought I was a cop for the first few months,” Perlman said. “Now, I’m a little bit of a celebrity among the homeless.”

That could have something to do with his paying them $20 each to pose. He also gives $10 if they create for him an original poem or painting.

He has completed about 65 18-by-24-inch paintings; each took 15 to 25 hours.

Perlman usually starts a portrait at the beach and finishes from photographs at an easel in his kitchen, in a style he calls “representational post-Impressionist.” Some faces have sad eyes. Some have loopy grins. Some of his subjects hide behind their hair or flaunt lip, nose and eyebrow piercings.

Perlman has invested in video equipment and is editing interviews with his subjects for a documentary. He also plans to produce a photo book, incorporating their personal stories and creative works. If the projects eventually generate income and he can recoup some of his costs, he intends to donate proceeds to nonprofit groups that serve the homeless.

Earlier this year, he displayed 40 paintings at a meeting about homelessness. Representatives of agencies that provide housing and services studied each image and biography.

“He has an ability to express in his work the essence and the soul and the core of the individual,” said Wendy Colman Levin, a member of a business leaders task force on homelessness. “Each time he paints a new one, he’s not just painting a person’s face. He’s painting their life story, their struggle, their hope.”

Now and then, Perlman hears some good news about his subjects. He is pleased for Daniel, the 50-something architectural project manager from Texas who started smoking crack cocaine after his family was killed. After six years on the beach, Daniel has moved into an apartment.

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For one recent excursion, Perlman fills his 1999 Infiniti I-30 with food, painting supplies and a dozen of his favorite portraits, and drives the two miles to Venice Beach.

In a parking lot at the foot of Rose Avenue, Perlman greets Kemberly “Doc” Jordan, dressed in black pants with the cuffs rolled up, a Big Lots T-shirt, a Kobe Bryant 24 Lakers jersey and a camouflage hat with an “Eat Me” patch. Jordan’s hands are gnarled and his nails split. His front teeth are missing, making him look older than his 53 years. He lives on the beach in a tent fashioned of umbrellas, tucked behind giant garbage bins. He earns money fixing bikes.

Perlman hands him a container of blended vegetable soup. “Healthy, no salt,” Perlman says.

A few months ago, thugs beat Jordan and stomped on his face. When Perlman saw the injuries, he went to a drugstore and bought hydrogen peroxide, bandages and first aid tape.

When Jordan’s wife, Lillian, was on her deathbed, she told him to follow his dream. Seven years ago, he made his way to Venice, which he had first seen in 1963. “It felt like my grandmother hugged me,” he says of encountering the beach and boardwalk. “This is where I was gonna live and die.”

One of Perlman’s aims this day is to show Cory “Pigpen” Rice his completed portrait and give him an 8-by-10-inch print as a memento.

He locates Rice amid a knot of young travelers, relaxing and drinking next to the boardwalk. “That’s awesome!” Rice tells Perlman before shouting to his pals: “Check out me as a work of art.”

Rice, 31, says he grew up in a house a block from the boardwalk and started running free at the beach by age 5. At 15, he began hopping trains and hitchhiking, he says. Although he has worked as a video game tester, he prefers his peripatetic life outdoors.

A few months ago in San Francisco, he met Aftin Combs. They became engaged and plan a July 3 wedding at a festival in Tennessee. Combs expects her father, a construction worker, and mother, a tattoo artist, to be there.

With Rice’s encouragement, Combs has agreed to pose for Perlman. He hands her a $20 bill, then uses a palette of blues, burnt sienna, cadmium orange and lemon yellow to rough out her round face, blue eyes and orange-dyed hair. “I look really happy in it,” Combs says.

“Aftin never fit in where she was,” Perlman says after wishing the couple a safe trip. “She felt alienated and unaccepted. Now she has a peer group that accepts her. That’s why she’s happy. But I feel like they’re running away from their pain.”

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Perlman, 58, has undergone more than three decades of therapy to address his own harrowing childhood. Although he was part of a “nice, Jewish family,” Perlman said, his parents often lashed out at him and his four brothers and sisters.

“I was traumatized, cruelly beaten and smashed up, yet deeply loved and taken good care of,” Perlman said.

His father was “a violent man who would, when angry, physically assault his children,” Perlman said in an article published in “Transformations in Self Psychology,” a 2004 book. “On some occasions I would watch him cut open, butcher and filet the deer he shot on hunting trips.... I remembered how my father, when he was angry with me, would bang and point the razor-sharp carving knife at me. I remember at those moments being afraid that he would cut my stomach open, pull out my guts and filet me.”

His father graduated from high school at 16 and wanted to attend Rutgers, but his parents insisted that he stay home and work. Perlman suspects that his father suffered from post-traumatic stress disorderafter serving on bombers during World War II. Sam Perlman became a successful Brooklyn deli owner and a confidant of New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey.

Perlman recalled that his mother would often turn angry, then violent, toward her children. In his 1999 book “The Therapist’s Emotional Survival,” he described an episode when as a 5-year-old he accidentally knocked over his milk. His mother shook him and pinched him until he bled. As an adult, he thinks he knows why. During the Depression, she was left to tend to her baby sister as her parents worked. Often, there was no food in the house. Perlman figures his mother, now 85, took out her guilt and frustration on her own children.

“My parents would have given their lives for me, but they were the people most likely to kill me,” he said. “It’s that combination that makes me who I am.”

In Perlman’s home office, portraits are stacked in high cubbies and against walls. He regrets ever having ignored the transients he has come to know and like. “They’re some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met in my life,” he said. “I had truly been judging the book by its cover.”

The high regards are mutual. Even though he has painted Jordan’s portrait twice, Perlman continues to seek him out, just to chat. Maybe it’s the portraits, maybe it’s the blended soup, maybe it’s just that somebody paid attention, but Jordan is always happy to see him.

PHOTOS: Painting portraits in Venice

martha.groves@latimes.com