The Studio
A concrete cell. A solid steel door painted a muted grey-blue. A thin mattress on a metal bedframe. A window offering no view, its frosted over plexiglass a barrier between me and the natural world. Overhead fluorescent
lights, cold and bright, reflect off a glossy white wall. I'm alone in solitary confinement on federal death row, locked in a maximum-security cell the size of a parking space. This cell doubles as my art studio, where I explore my humanity and feel qualities of life too subtle to capture in words.
I set out my acrylic paints. I gravitate toward earth tones, a tribute to the natural world from which I've been banished, my feet deprived of soil and grass the last two decades. I prop up a white canvas against the wall. I texture it with pieces of death row, with sand from sandbags, sawdust used for spills, tissue and typing paper, pieces of stucco peeled from a concrete wall at rec. I ground the canvas using art supplies purchased from Blick.com, with acrylic gels and mediums, crackling and fibrous paste, which the prison charges an additional 30% markup on the retail price. The texture, mostly broken, fractured, scarred, concretizes felt impressions of my life.
Artist
Statement
The Process
After the texture dries and hardens, I paint the underlying feel of my life. I splatter, dab, wash, paint, seeking to
capture, in color, nuances of trauma-stress and resilience, brokenness and beauty, moral injury and atonement.
When I'm successful, my works become autobiographical memorials, memoirs of felt impressions of past and present, of freedom and captivity, and the moody tension between the two.
The Significance
The Resistance
Art is also my playground. It's how I rebel against the rigors of incarceration. How I resist being beaten into the hard image of prison life. A life seen etched in tattooed faces, menacing stares, clenched jaws of men set on edge, with hard steel in hand for the opposition. Art allows me to dance in the midst of this distress, to become entangled in Life, in all Its universal shades.
The Artist Life
Art is what the the heart does
when it runs outside
to play in Life.
With radical abandon,
it smashes open cans of paint
on hallowed grounds, where it ought not be.
As colors drip and mingle,
the ordinary is transformed into a marvelous work worthy
of divine praise.
Such exuberant playfulness
vandalizes conventions and offends
lawful critics.
But the heart laughs,
rebelling against their rules, breaking free
of customs the dead holds so dear.
Art is what happens
when a heart gets entangled
with Life.