What Difference Do It Make? by Ron Hall

Author:Ron Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

DON

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.

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