THE ART OF AWARENESS MAN PAINTS PORTRAITS OF MISSING CHILDREN.

Byline: Harrison Sheppard Staff Writer

TARZANA - When most people open their mailbox to find those little fliers with pictures of missing children, they see them not as children, but as junk mail to be thrown away without a second glance.

John Paul Thornton sees a life and a story.

It's a story the 34-year-old Tarzana artist is compelled to tell through his paintings.

Since 1991, when he was stunned by the abduction of one of his students, Thornton has painted 300 portraits of missing children, using the pictures on those Advo, Inc. mailers as his models.

His goal is not necessarily to find the particular children he paints, but to raise awareness of the issue, he said.

``Everyone has told me, `I look at my fliers now,' '' Thornton said. ``And that's how these kids are found.''

``They're found by someone saying, Wait a minute. That's the kid who just moved in next door. Or that's the kid I'm baby-sitting.''

On Saturday, National Missing Children's Day, Thornton plans to display his 300 paintings on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The exhibit will be a sort of living art display, with hundreds of volunteers lined up to hold the paintings in their hands, giving them a vitality they lack when hanging from the walls of sterile art galleries.

After that, he is taking his paintings on a 16-city tour, traveling to Boston, Philadelphia, Oklahoma and Florida, among other locations, and coming back to Los Angeles for the next National Missing Children's Day on May 25.

When not painting missing children, the lifelong San Fernando Valley resident specializes in larger-than-life expressionist portraits that can sell for $5,000 each. But he refuses to accept money for the missing children paintings, feeling it would be inappropriate.

Abbey Potash, a New Jersey woman whose son was painted by Thornton, said she was touched and thankful for his portrait and his attempt to raise public awareness of the issue.

``This is a very grim subject,'' Potash said. ``I'm glad this can be done in an artistic way to catch the public's eye and present it so they'll actually look at it.''

Her 13-year-old son Sam was abducted by her ex-husband in July 1997 and recovered eight months later thanks to an Advo flier, she said. Sam plans to hold his own painting at the Lincoln Memorial.

Thornton started painting missing children in 1991 when he was teaching at-risk youths at a school in Sherman Oaks. One of his students - ``this freckle-faced, spunky little kid who was a complete handful'' - didn't show up, and he was told she had been abducted by a family member.

``It had a huge effect on me,'' he recalled. ``When I got home that day I thought, what could we do?''

When he got his mail that same day, he came across one of the advertising fliers sent out by Connecticut-based Advo with pictures of missing children on one side and ads or coupons on the other.

That's when it hit him: He'd been getting these things in the mail all these years and barely gave them a second glance. But they were real people - real children - and they shouldn't be tossed aside like so much junk mail, he thought.

He started painting the portraits at first just for himself, without displaying them publicly, as a sort of private therapy.

``To me it seemed somehow I was giving life back to this little kid I never knew,'' he said.

When an art dealer expressed interest, Thornton started displaying his paintings in exhibits next to his for-sale work, but continued to refuse money for them. Then last year, in an attempt to reach beyond the art world, he held his first outdoor exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He called on his students, friends and local groups, and managed to assemble hundreds of volunteers who took turns holding the paintings.

His paintings can have a powerful effect on the viewer. He takes a blue-tinted, fuzzy picture and breathes life into it, adding color and facial expressions that in some cases express a kind of lost sadness, and in others a child's joy.

The reactions he has gotten at shows, he said, have been overwhelming; one woman recognized a painting from a flier she had thrown away and started crying, he said.

The Advo mailers have led to the safe return of about 100 children, according to Shirley Goins, executive director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's California branch.

And Thornton's work, she said, helps to make sure the mailers continue to do their job.

``Suddenly those pictures become alive,'' Goins said. ``They're no longer just on the (center's) Web site or on the posters, but they are actually alive and people are concerned about them.''

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2 photos

Photo: (1) Some of John Paul Thornton's missing children paintings are shown in his studio.

(2) John Paul Thornton will be taking hundreds of his Missing Children paintings to Washington, D.C., where people will wear them around their necks.

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer