Brush With Crime Turns Into Visions of Beauty

His boss, Sgt. Tracy Williams, took the suggestion seriously. She instructed all corrections officers to keep an eye out for inmates with artistic talent. Officer Michael Keeler, who had seen Bullock paint a mural at the Southern Maryland Pre-Release Unit in Charlotte Hall, came back with his name.

Charles officials had long been exploring ideas to make the detention center a more positive place. The inmates there, officials said, eventually will eat, shop and work alongside their neighbors who have never been in prison. The jail should prepare its prisoners to interact with those people, officials said.

And how do the murals accomplish that? "I think it's just going to change the atmosphere, the environment," Taylor said.

Even with Bullock's work, the detention center still looks and feels like a prison. Inmates in jumpsuits peer out drab cell windows. Officers in control booths open and close doors remotely.

But there are patches of life.

In the jail's main hallway -- the one most inmates walk through every day -- a duck swims in a pond filled with cattails and a farmer plows his field with a John Deere tractor. The airbrushed work has a hip, graffiti-like feel to it.

"That's the Southern Maryland world," Bullock said. "You got the deer, you got a lot of open fields. Of course, you got your farms with your John Deere tractors."

Although he once listed "graphic artist" as his occupation in court documents, Bullock is not a professionally trained painter. Most of his experience comes from his many years behind bars, working with jail-provided equipment.

At the Eastern Correctional Institution, he mastered the Magic Marker, learning how to load dried-up markers with different colors to produce a gradient. In Charles, he has mastered mixing airbrush paints and crosshatching with the "safety pen," a flexible writing instrument barely bigger than his finger.

"You get a knack for it," Bullock said.

A talented artist though he may be, Bullock is still a convicted criminal. In 2006, Bullock pleaded guilty to theft and assault charges stemming from an incident in which he tripped a Wal-Mart security guard after shoplifting from the store. At the same time, he pleaded guilty to possessing cocaine in another case.

When Bullock pleaded guilty this year to cocaine possession in a third case, he was on probation from the earlier convictions. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail, plus four months for violating his probation.