The Art of Homelessness
Most of the thirty or so men sitting in a circle at the Union Gospel Mission in Saint Paul, Minnesota, didn’t look like they’d been acquainted with a comb for a while. Their clothes were clean, Don Thomas told us, but they didn’t quite fit. Some of the men were addicts and ex-cons. Some were just down on their luck. Don wasn’t sure such a rough-looking batch of guys would be interested in what he had come to say.
“I’m here to see if any of you would be interested in learning a little about art,” said Don, a designer for an architectural firm in Saint Paul. “Drawing, painting, that kind of thing.”
Some of the men threw each other skeptical sideways glances. Others kept their eyes trained on the floor. But one man with a ruddy, wrinkled face and approximately four good teeth spoke right up. “We ain’t gonna weave any of them [expletive] baskets like we did in prison, are we?”
“Oh, no,” Don replied with a smile. ‘We’re going to draw naked women.”
The whole circle burst out laughing, and a show of hands revealed that every man present was suddenly, miraculously, interested in what Don had to teach about art.
I believe art can make a big difference in anyone’s life. After Deborah died and Denver moved in with me, I suggested he try his hand at painting. He thought that was a good idea, judging that he couldn’t do any worse than some of the multimillion-dollar pieces he’d seen by Jackson Pollack and Pablo Picasso when I took him to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. And once he started, Denver took to painting like a bull rider to a rodeo. Since Same Kind of Different as Me came out, he has sold more than three hundred paintings.
Art had made a difference for Don Thomas too. In fact, it had been his salvation.
After his mom died when he was a teenager, his dad raised him. A proud Marine, his dad numbed the pain of his loss with alcohol, and Don was left alone a lot. “By junior high, I was making bad decisions, drinking, being cavalier about relationships with girls,” Don says. “It’s amazing I didn’t get myself in trouble for fathering a child too young.”
Fortunately, a high school art teacher reached out to the young man and helped him find a different path. “To be able to draw what I was feeling and seeing, to express some of my anger—I believe it changed my life.”
Don went on to become a principal at a prominent Saint Paul commercial architectural firm while also pursuing fine art as an avocation. Every year around Thanksgiving, his firm would pass the hat among the employees for donations to the mission; then management would match those donations and write the mission a check.
But something about the way all that was handled bothered Don. “In the end, I thought it was a little disrespectful,” he says. “It was like we were saying, ‘We’ll give you the money, but we don’t want to see your people or hear about what you do.’”
So, in 2008, Don toured the mission and found himself amazed at the dedication of the staff, at the work being done.
There were addiction recovery classes and classes on life skills such as parenting, budgeting, and computers. There were job skills training programs and connections to agencies that could help with transitional housing.
After his tour, Don knew without a doubt that writing a check just wasn’t going to be good enough for him anymore. He had to share with these men, give of himself, make a difference.
That’s when he piped up and offered to teach a class on art.
Now he found himself in a roomful of homeless men, sharing a little about his own tarnished past and how art helped him cope with the pain and heartache of his mom’s early death.
“I have no clue why art works, why it helps,” he told his world-weary audience. “I’m not a therapist. All I know is that it’s powerful for me. And if I can give any of that to you, to be able maybe just to see the world a little differently, it will be worth it.”
The following week, about a dozen men returned. One guy in the program, Dave, was a real talker. Dave liked to draw, but he liked to talk even more. He came for a couple of sessions, but after the third, he walked up to Don and said, “I really appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m not going to come in anymore. I’ve decided to focus on another part of the program.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Don said, wondering whether he hadn’t made the class interesting enough.
Later that day, though, one of the mission counselors told Don, “Dave’s an addict. It was an enormous step for him to come and let you know his plans. Most guys in recovery just drift away.”
Somehow, Don’s commitment to teaching the men art had inspired Dave to honor that commitment by taking responsibility—something addicts rarely do.
Don remembers another man, Alex, an alcoholic who was extremely talented at a particular style of drawing.
After Don complimented his work one day, Alex asked him, “Do you think I could make money at it?”
“Well, your stuff looks like tattoo art,” Don said. “I know a guy who gets eight hundred bucks anytime someone uses one of his drawings for a tattoo.”
“Maybe I could do something like that,” Alex said, adding shading to a dragon figure he was drawing.
Alex didn’t come back the next week . . . or the next Later, Don heard he’d started drinking again. Still, their conversation suggested a glimmer of hope. “Alex was looking beyond the next hour, the next drink, at what the future might hold.
When he first started teaching at the mission, Don had hoped to uncover some hidden talent—the next Picasso or Remington, undiscovered, wrapped in rags instead of a fancy art degree. Perhaps inside one of these broken men lay an artist who had only been waiting for the right nurturing.
Soon though, Don realized that it wasn’t the art itself that was making a difference to these men but “the doing of the art, the stories surrounding the art.”
Drawing and painting calmed the men down, helped them express themselves in a different way. “You don’t have to put everything into words,” Don says. “Sometimes you don’t have words.”
Beautiful gardens surrounded the mission—flowers, vines, and trellises sheltered in leafy canopies of shade. One day, Don took a handful of men outside and told them, “Pick anything you want to draw. But whatever you pick, you’re going to draw it eight times.”
It was an exercise in commitment. “Commitment and follow-through is hard for addicts,” Don said. “They want something that’s immediate. When something doesn’t work quickly, they move on to something else.”
One man picked a vine-covered trellis. But as he sketched and sketched, he focused on the trellis itself, struggling over and over to render the spots where the thin, white wood crossed. It was as though he didn’t see the vines or the leaves or the flowers at all. Meanwhile, he became more and more frustrated and impatient.
“Slow down a little,” Don coached him. “What else do you see here? Do you see leaves? Shadows? Colors?”
The man tried again, this time relaxing a little, sinking into the moment, less intent on the hard detail and more open to the total picture. After a few more tries, he showed his piece to Don, who was impressed with what the man had achieved in the end.
Art, said Don, teaches something we all need to learn, especially about people who are different from ourselves: “To see things the way they truly are, sometimes you have to look more deeply.”