With These Art Students, Best Work Is Done in Pen

It’s not your ordinary painting class, despite the funky art teacher dressed in black and the still-life-with-fruit arranged on the table.

The class is often interrupted, sometimes canceled, as students up to their elbows in pastel dust are hauled away each time trouble erupts nearby.

The art teacher, Jill Ansell, carries a push-button alarm in case she is attacked.

Even paintbrushes pose a threat and must be collected at the end of each session.

“You could file them down and do all sorts of things,” explained Leah Joki, who directs art programs at the Lancaster facility.

Still, a handful of inmates on the maximum-security yards at the state prison here draw and paint and smudge the pastel lines with their fingers, creating images of distant families, religious icons and landscapes they may never see again.

Although none of them was there to witness it, the first public exhibition of their work opened Saturday night at a gallery at the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish social service center at 1525 S. Robertson Blvd. in Los Angeles. The free show will run through Sept. 1.

“It’s a way to say, ‘Hey, not everybody in here is an animal.’ People are doing more than just being gangsters,” said Mitchell Smiley, 39, who is serving a 15-year-to-life sentence for second-degree murder.

Smiley is one of Ansell’s “prize students,” a self-taught painter with a graying beard who has been incarcerated for more than half his life. At least 10 of the paintings in the show are his, but Smiley’s most ornate canvas is his skin itself, emblazoned with intricate, blue tattoos.

Then there is Derrick Mosley, one of the newer students, who joined the class a few months ago. Ansell is particularly proud of the shy, halting artist who liked to sketch Mickey Mouse cards in his cell but seemed unsure of his drawing ability. She taught him how to use pastels.

“It’s motivated me to stay in contact with my children,” said Mosley, 35, who is serving a life sentence for rape and robbery. He sends his artwork to his 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.

For the last two years, Ansell has taught six-hour classes twice a week at the all-male California State Prison in Lancaster. The California Arts Council, a state agency that funds artists in schools and other facilities, awarded her $12,600 annually to work as an artist-in-residence there. The grant is matched by a $6,000-a-year grant from a prison program called Arts in Corrections.

With wild, rust-colored hair, lips painted the color of wine, and wooden beads wrapped around her left wrist, Ansell sticks out among the stony-faced security officers and denim-clad inmates.

But it is here, inside the electrified fence that rings the high desert prison, that this fiftysomething painter with a master’s degree in fine arts and a long history of exhibiting her own paintings believes she is most needed.

“Going into the prison is almost as satisfying as doing my own work as a painter,” Ansell said. “I’m helping other people connect to this creative process and I feel it’s so healing for them. There is tremendous, deep depression here. I feel if I can bring some light and hope and purpose to these people, that I’m contributing to the world.”

Although violence can erupt at any time in prison, Ansell said she has never been afraid of the inmates and, so far, has never had to push her alarm button. Fights fueled by ethnic tension are common on the yard, prompting guards to hustle the inmates out of art class and back to their cells as they lock down the entire area.

Mostly, Ansell said, she feels compassion for the prisoners, many of them serving life terms.

“Every person has a dark side, every person has a possibility of criminality, so far be it from me to judge anyone,” she said. “I think people make mistakes and I think people are the products of their environments.”

The 73 paintings now adorning the walls of the Workmen’s Circle are not for sale--the prison and its inmates are not permitted to profit from the art, said Joki, the prison’s art director. Instead, the 20 artists can give their work to their families or donate it to the prison, to be auctioned in the fall to raise money for a nonprofit music camp in Palmdale.

Even so, some victims’ rights advocates do not think artwork by violent felons should be displayed to the public.

“That creates sympathy for the prisoner,” said Harriet Salarno, president of Crime Victims United of California, whose daughter was slain in 1979. “The public doesn’t know what that prisoner did . . . or what happened to the victim’s family.”

Eric Gordon, the gallery’s director, said that the Workmen’s Circle often displays art highlighting social issues such as immigration and homelessness. An all-inmate art show, he said, “just seemed to fit.”

“We want to show that we don’t just lock people up and throw away the keys,” Gordon said. “Their humanity remains.”