Inmate's Murals Brighten Charles Jail and Own Outlook
By Matt Zapotosky
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
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.
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.
Waist-length dreads tied up behind his head, Bullock talks slowly, stuttering every now and then as he gets lost in thought. He is friendly, saying hello to nearly every officer he passes in the hallway.
"All the officers know his name. When everybody knows someone's name, nine out of 10 times, it's a bad thing," Taylor said.
Not so with Bullock.
Jail higher-ups had no problem trusting Bullock to paint the detention center walls. They would simply lock him in a classroom, take a detailed inventory of his materials and let him go, Williams said. For the massive Southern Maryland mural in the hallway, they restricted his painting hours to between 11:30 p.m. and 4 a.m., when most inmates are asleep.
For his work, Bullock gets special project credits, which might help move his release date up from April, Williams said. Bullock said he hopes to get out by February.
When he leaves, his legacy will remain on the jail walls.
"That's what an artist wants," Bullock said, gathering some sketches in a manila folder. "All the artist wants is for his work to be seen."
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