Making Friends

Painter Makes Portraits Of Homeless To Help Them Be Seen

The first time Suzon Lucore was stopped by police for feeding a homeless man, her response was swift. “You have an ordinance to not feed the homeless,” she remembers saying at the time, “but is it illegal to feed a friend? This is my friend.”

By Jessica Laskey Open Studio

Lucore has fed homeless people for almost two decades since moving to Midtown in 2007 after completing her bachelor’s degree in painting at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.

“I saw all these people who were hungry and started feeding them,” she says.

The instinct to lend a hand was ingrained early as the daughter of a church elder growing up in Rio Oso, 35 miles north in Sutter County. She worked for the church food bank at age 9. Her love of art started young, when she sold candy and drawings of cartoon characters on the bus to finance her art career. “It never occurred to me to be anything else but an artist,” she says.