Myth, chaos and spacefrom solitary confinement

"The morning after the opening of a show of his recent work, Donny Johnson was in his studio, a concrete cell in the Pelican Bay State Prison, where he is serving three life terms in solitary confinement for murder and for slashing a prison guard's throat. He was checking his supplies, taking inventory.

"His paintbrush, made of plastic wrap, foil and strands of his own hair, lay on the lower bunk. So did his paints, leached from M&M’s and sitting in little white plastic containers that once held packets of grape jelly. Next to them was a stack of the blank postcards that are his canvases...

"Donny Johnson lives in an 8-by-12-foot, or 9-square-meter, concrete cell. His meals are pushed through a slot in the door. Except for the odd visitor, whom he talks to through thick plexiglass, he interacts with no one. He has not touched another person in 17 years.

"His art, he said recently, is a solace, an obsession and a burden...

"Most prison art, the kind created in crafts classes and sold in gift shops, tends toward kitsch and caricature. But there are no classes or art supplies where Mr. Johnson is held, and his powerful, largely abstract paintings are something different. They reflect the sensory deprivation and diminished depth perception of someone held in a windowless cell for almost two decades.

"They pulse, some artists on the outside say, with memory and longing and madness. Others are less impressed, saying the works are interesting examples of human ingenuity but fall short of real artistic achievement..."

And those people are likely the entrenched academics and "professionals" who've forgotten (after drinking the art school Kool-Aid?) that such expression is the point and purpose of living and being human.