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On a Wednesday several years ago, one of the regulars approached artist Bill Mangum as he was leaving the morning prayer breakfast at Greensboro Urban Ministry, where he had just cooked eggs and passed out cups of milk.

“He said, 'I’m really struggling this morning,’” Mangum recalled. “He said, 'I’ve got full-blown AIDS.’ I said, 'Do your parents know?’”

The young man had been reluctant to tell them.

“I said, 'I’m a dad and I’d want to know.’”

Mangum drove away from the nonprofit that feeds and shelters the city’s poor and homeless to his studio to pick up a paint brush. He removed a closed front door from the painting of a snow-covered home with glittering lights, a scene he had completed for an Urban Ministry fundraiser. He changed the scene to a father and son embracing in an open front door.

“The Homecoming,” as the cover of the 2005 Holiday Honor Card, would earn $162,000. That’s a significant portion of the millions of dollars Mangum has helped the agency raise since 1988, through contemplative artwork that pairs the picturesque and a conscience, if only subtly.

This year’s painting, “First Light,” depicts a homeless person entering to worship in the solitude of the snow at St. John’s Chapel in the North Carolina mountains. The painting is part of a 20-year honor card retrospective on Mangum’s cards that’s now on display at his Lawndale Drive gallery.

“His art has a way of reaching the depths of your soul,” said the Rev. Mike Aiken, executive director at Urban Ministry.

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Betty Patterson has watched the successful watercolorist wipe Urban Ministry tables and clean up the trash left behind as if he enjoys it.

“You see all that writing back there,” Patterson said after finishing her plate of food, pointing to a white dry-erase board at the back of the room full of scribbled words he put there:

It’s what in the heart that counts. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance but the Lord looks at the heart.

1 Samuel 16:7

“We just love Brother Bill,” Patterson said.

Every week, Mangum, 56, one of the state’s best-known artists, gathers volunteers for devotion. And he recently held a successful fundraiser to replace the tables and chairs and spruce up the Urban Ministry’s Potter’s House.

“He could easily write a check,” said volunteer Morgan Dodd, a Northwest High School senior. “But I don’t think that would make him happy.”

Mangum feels he’s gotten the better deal.

“For me, to go down there is a constant grounding every week,” said Mangum, who last week was in a Washington meeting with first lady Laura Bush and other artists selected to design ornaments for this year’s White House Christmas tree.

Mangum painted the iconic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse with holiday greenery and a Christmas wreath.

He was back by Wednesday.

“He has a lot of demands on him, but for him it’s as natural as breathing to be here,” said Don Cupit, one of the leaders of A Friend’s Ministry, which organizes the Wednesday breakfast.

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Mangum’s journey as an artist began with a 59-cent watercolor set he bought while at UNCG to make his parents a Christmas present and continues with a career of limited-edition work now in the Mangum Gallery on Lawndale Drive.

He can still recall the thrill early in his career of coming across his paintings in a Carmel, Calif., shop. A set of paintings of Duke University sold fewer prints than anticipated but ended up on the office wall in Washington of Sen. Terry Sanford.

But Mangum, personable with a calming demeanor, admits having once been spoiled by early success and finding himself bankrupt.

A chance meeting in 1988 with a disheveled homeless man about that time helped change his priorities.

The man, Michael Saavedra, was paranoid schizophrenic.

“I felt like I could fix him,” Mangum said.

So he took him to Urban Ministry.

“It was an amazing contrast to work with someone who had nothing,” Mangum said.

Saavedra began showing up at his church and Mangum’s Sunday School class. While some parishioners there embraced Saavedra, others were repulsed.

“I would even get phone calls, anonymously, from people who said he really can’t come to church — and I said, 'He can’t come to church?’

“It was just uncanny what God was trying to speak to me through all of this,” Mangum said.

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The first year, Mangum offhandedly agreed to paint the cover of the nonprofit’s new holiday honor card and then didn’t think of it again — not until the neighbor who had approached him asked how it was going, when it should have been almost done.

The nonprofit had begun the fundraiser the year before, in 1987. People who donate at least $5 get a card to keep or to send to a family or friend informing them a donation has been made in their honor.

Mangum found inspiration for the 1988 card one night at 3:27 a.m. on South Elm Street while on the hood of his Jeep, surveying the landscape. A voice he heard in the distance was Saavedra.

The resulting “Not Forgotten” featured a lone man walking with bags in the snow, not far from the old Kress building, with 3:27 flashing on the old Jefferson-Pilot clock.

“We could take it for granted that it’s just a beautiful scene,” Mangum said.

The Urban Ministry raised $53,000 that year.

The 1995 cover, “Michael’s Gift,” reflects the snowman Saavedra once left in the yard of a couple who had been nice to him.

A 1997 cover, “Bread of Life,” shows a man receiving bread at the door of the Old Mill at Oak Ridge. “Evening’s Peace,” from 2004, is a man’s late-night stroll through a neighborhood, only the man in the painting isn’t on his way home. He has no home.

Mangum reproduces the original paintings as limited-edition prints — some of which remain available.

“It would be nice to have another season,” he jokes of the constant snow.

But people like the snow.

“There’s a peace about it,” Mangum said. “There’s a simplicity.”

Another constant is the lone man walking.

“Here we are 20 years later,” Mangum said of the influence of Saavedra, whom he found dead in his apartment in 1990, “and his friendship continues to resonate.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com