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On a recent rainy afternoon at St. Vincent de Paul’s dining facility in Eureka, a small group of artists hunch over tables cluttered with art supplies, homemade almond cookies and half-finished paintings. The laughter of Free Meal volunteers and Elton John’s Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” fills the room as the painters quietly bring their creations to life.

“I’m working on an ocean scene,” Lance explains as he smudges cobalt blue paint into a dark cloud. “This time I’ve decided to do a nighttime scene. I’m gonna have a lighthouse, and I’m gonna try my best to put some lighting in it. I’m trying to figure out how to describe wind; maybe I’ll put a tree in there blowing to one side or something.”

Another painter, Fridom, is working on a piece with two pale yellow orchids against a multi-hued blue backdrop. He plans to add orange metallic lines throughout to “give it a graphic look.”

“I’m doing another panel with a large red flower and stylized ocean waves in the back,” he says.

The workshop, Art for the Heart, is led by Maureen McGarry, a longtime watercolorist and painting instructor who, in her retirement, started teaching art classes for survivors of sexual assault and people experiencing homelessness. She’s been teaching the painting workshop at St. Vinny’s for the last six months. The class is typically held outside, but they take it inside on rainy days. Several pieces, all painted on donated wood panels, are already on display along the chain link fence across Third Street.

McGarry hopes that the art display will discourage graffiti and “lift up the neighborhood,” but more than anything, she wants to provide a space for people to express themselves.

“When I’m out here with these folks, they’re so focused and they get into this almost meditative state when they’re here with the paints,” she says. “They get to travel into their paintings and into another state of mind. I really love that aspect of it. What we’re providing here is an opportunity for people to be creative and express themselves in a peaceful way, and what we’re getting are all these peaceful, euphoric, sublime images. … I like that it gives their personalities an opportunity to shine because this is where they hang out and get their one meal for the day.”

Pointing to one of Lance’s pieces, McGarry says, “We call these ‘Lance-scapes’ because they’re of his imagination. He doesn’t have to worry about realism or copying a photograph. He sees these images in his head, and he paints several layers — they’re always changing.”

The class has given McGarry a new perspective on Eureka’s unhoused community. She acknowledges the stigma surrounding homelessness and fears other residents may have about visiting the St. Vinny’s neighborhood where many people camp, but hopes the art display will help change that.

“There’s a lot of stigma that causes people to be afraid of stay away from here; I felt that at one time too,” she says. “It’s cool to be literally on the street with them doing street art because it kind of takes away that stigma, you know? They’re just people making art, and they have ideas and thoughts and feelings the same as everybody else.”

Similarly, Lance says the art class gives unhoused residents like himself a new community and “something to show off.”

“The idea is to let the people who live around here — the residentially challenged, as I call them — see something productive going on and want to be a part of it,” he says. “It gives them actual ownership of something and instills pride in the area. … It gives those who are out here on the street an actual door to go through, a window to open, a bridge to actually cross to allow positive interactions with not just each other, but with you know members of the city.”

Hannah Ozanian, Uplift Eureka’s social services coordinator, underscored the need for innovative solutions to effectively address the city’s homelessness crisis, but hopes the Third Street paintings provide “a little lovely blip of something amongst some of the sadness and hard times.”

“We need to envision real solutions,” Ozanian says. “On a personal level, I think [this art class] is a good practice for our folks who have faced tremendous obstacles, and it’s a good practice for us on a community level. If we can change the way that our landscape — in this case, this fence line — looks, what else can we do? It seems minor, but it is major.”

Laura Montagna, a homeless liaison for the Eureka Police Department’s Community Safety Engagement Team (CSET), donated the wood panels and a few other supplies for the project. She recalls that when the boards were being primed after Free Meal when the class first started, it piqued people’s interest.

“It was so awesome to see other people like, ‘Oh, what’s happening here? Can I paint something?’” she says. “That’s it for me. That made my month, you know?”

Up until a couple of months ago, the stretch of sidewalk below the art display was cluttered with tents. Montagna says EPD officers cleared the encampment after the department started receiving reports of people being victimized. EPD subsequently increased patrols along Third Street to discourage people from camping on the sidewalk.

The property behind the art display will one day host the Humboldt Navigation Center, a resource center offering access to shelter, affordable housing options, public health benefits, job training and mental health support. When the navigation center was first proposed in 2023, city and county staff expected it would be fully built out by mid-2025, but the project hit a funding snag and was delayed. The project is still making its way through the city’s permitting process.

The art display will be up as long as the fence stands and the primer holds, Ozanian says. “We know they’re temporary, but we want them to last as long as they can outside.”

The art class is always in need of art supplies and funding. Those interested in donating may do so at this link. Keep scrolling for more photos of the Third Street art display.

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