Changing lives and creating art. Special correspondent Mike Surrey looks at a tried and true program in East

Los Angeles and the forces behind it. It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

It's beautiful, hi, Lisa. One of Fabian DeBora's first art commissions was this mural on a neighborhood grocery store in East Los Angeles,

while a recovering drug addict on probation.

There were times when I was sick and my addiction that Don Miguel will give me a job opportunity,

paint my store, paint the letters here, paint some flowers there,

just to keep me in the art also away from doing stealing

or anything.

Today, he's a celebrated Chicano muralist and this year's recipient of a National Endowment

of the Arts Heritage Fellowship.

Art is a par for two.

It can make you or it could break you.

A survivor of the all-too-familiar East Los Angeles cycle of a challenging childhood

due to immigration, drugs, gangs, and family incarceration issues,

art has been Fabian's escape to a much different life for himself and his family.

Every time life will seem hard and dark or I would feel out of place,

I will go under a coffee table and I will begin to create my own worlds to escape my reality.

That's when I found art to be more than just the gift.

It was sort of like a big brother.

He also discovered a guardian angel in his parish priest, Father Greg Boyle, who encouraged him to stick with his art and defended him in juvenile courts.

Father Greg just kept accepting, embracing, and receiving me regardless of where I was at in my life.

No matter what, he never shut the door.

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