Brush With Crime Turns Into Visions of Beauty

Inmate's Murals Brighten Charles Jail and Own Outlook

In each vivid green and vibrant gold brush stroke on the walls of the Charles County Detention Center, there is a piece of inmate Wesley Bullock's imagination.

Some of it is captured in the intricate sheriff's badge Bullock airbrushed above the dumbbells in the officers' weight room. Another part has been immortalized in the quintessential Southern Maryland landscape he crafted in the jail's main hallway.

"It's like, 'Man, that came out of my head,' " Bullock said, gazing curiously at a field of black-eyed Susans he painted in a jailhouse classroom. "You can imagine it, but being able to put it on paper . . . "

He could not find the words to finish the thought.

For the past several months, Bullock, convicted of cocaine possession and violating his probation, has become the detention center's unofficial artist-in-residence.

When jail officials wanted to start a training program for prisoners reentering society, they commissioned Bullock, 37, to paint "windows looking into a possible future" on the classroom wall. When the gang officers wanted to add some color to their dingy room, they turned to Bullock for a scene of two gang members tossing aside their red and blue bandannas, or "giving up the lifestyle," as Bullock puts it.

He has completed seven paintings on the jail walls, and he is working on illustrating a sheriff's office campaign targeted at troubled youths. The pieces typically start as rough sketches, which Bullock copies onto overhead projection paper. The projection forms an outline for his airbrushing.

"It's a release for me," Bullock said. "It gets me out of here, takes my mind somewhere else."

Jail officials hope his work has a similar effect on the other inmates.

Bullock, who lived in Brandywine before his incarceration, said he did not approach corrections officers to ask whether he could "mess up a big piece" of their wall. They approached him.

Ryan Taylor, an officer at the jail, was standing in his boss's office one day when he noticed a large mural of an aquatic scene -- not Bullock's work -- painted on the wall.

"We should do that all over the building," he casually suggested.