Free Expression in Art Liberates Inmates’ Spirits

The envelopes, all addressed to MARY at a Ventura address, carry so much more than the love letters they once contained.

Each is lavishly illustrated, an original artwork.

One, postmarked last month, features a horrific monster head, devil through and through, ringed in skulls and licked by hellish flames.

Another suggests things were a bit more mellow the month before; in February, the correspondent, an inmate at Ventura County Jail, illustrated his letter with a tropical scene incorporating the ocean, a surfboard and a multicolored macaw, all framed in lush greenery. Yet another from February bears a pencil sketch of a scruffy cowboy brewing coffee over a fire in front of a ranch gate that reads: I LOVE YOU.

The inmate goes unnamed on his envelopes or in his display of 12 framed works hung at the government center here, part of a show of prison inmate art. No matter.

His message is out, and it has nothing to do with fame or recognition or notoriety: I’m in the slammer, and my life is not over.

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Real art certainly knows no bounds. Still, images that emanate from cellblocks and work camps do tend to form their own genre.

Fantasies of beautiful places. Gnarly, claustrophobic abstractions that work as apt metaphor for confinement. Urgent, chaotic collages that extrapolate from urgent, chaotic lives.

No one knows this better than the man who taught the inmates to find their visions. In doing so, he managed to guide dope dealers, safecrackers and other of our society’s errant to pick one of the toughest locks of all: one’s own brain.

Jack Gilmour is on contract from the Oxnard Adult Education program to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and works as a teacher at the county’s Ojai Farm, a work camp. Inmates there live as prisoners do but also slop hogs and otherwise perform the maintenance of a working ranch. Over the past three years, those taking Gilmour’s art class have found that image-making had less to do with paint or charcoal than a way of seeing things.

“These are people who spent their lives believing ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ which more often than not is why they got themselves in a jam,” says Gilmour. “So this art thing is about building some self-esteem. When they find they can actually draw or paint, it’s expressive, and the mentality changes. Suddenly, it’s ‘I can .’ I know that doesn’t sound like much. But for these people, it is.”

As the sketches show, these inmates can commit art indeed.

Near the center of the administration building’s seating area is a piece by inmate Ann Alva, who used chalk to create three-dimensional, labyrinthine curves that stunningly recall M.C. Escher.

A facing wall contains a surreal vision in bright candy colors by an inmate who declined to sign his or her name. In this image, a giant pink, yellow and purple butterfly appears underwater alongside a turquoise fish with orange scales and a yellow fish from whose back grows a palm tree that reaches above water to the setting sun. Everything is topsy-turvy, illusionesque. A purple/cobalt sky is moonless but does have a passion flower resembling a human eye. And hovering over much of the image is the shadow of a woman’s hand: red fingernails, knuckle creases in the shape of pouting, ready-to-kiss lips.

Everything, it seems, is just out of reach; yet the artist’s inherent belief in transcendence is so apparent that everything, as only real art can make it, is more real than ever.

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Redemption comes in many forms.

Jack Gilmour is perhaps first among those who know that not everyone agrees prison inmates ought to have time to doodle, to draw their way into a state of transcendence that, if only for a moment, removes shackles. Indeed, this art show, which runs through June, is collected from classes that ended--for good--only this spring. Some of the works were simply left behind by inmates who are long gone.

“I’m exalted by these inmates,” says Gilmour. “Yes, they come from a narrow, often prejudiced side of the tracks. But in dealing with art, they are working on meditation and focusing themselves and in naming things in their own lives. I had one guy, a heroin addict, whose work opened up a spiritual side, a side he’d never known.”

Gilmour claims no healing powers, sells no promise of rehabilitation.

But he is without apology in asserting that art is distinct from slopping the hogs, that it involves the far greater personal challenge of illustrating a piece of one’s life.

“There’s always the hope of connecting with the inmate,” he says. “You reach out and make a bond, and you both hope for something. And then they’re gone.”

Except, of course, the drawings and paintings and sketches they leave behind: icons all of private hopes and dreams that go well beyond the farm and a release date X-ed on a calendar.