Before he went to prison, Mark Loughney used watercolors and acrylics to create bright, playful portraits of his favorite musicians. His early work features Trey Anastasio and Grace Potter and Snoop Dogg, all smiling and content, deep into their guitars and joints. But then Loughney himself took a dark turn, committing a crime that even now, years later, he can barely explain.
Before he went to prison, Mark Loughney used watercolors and acrylics to create bright, playful portraits of his favorite musicians. His early work features Trey Anastasio and Grace Potter and Snoop Dogg, all smiling and content, deep into their guitars and joints. But then Loughney himself took a dark turn, committing a crime that even now, years later, he can barely explain.
After he entered prison, his partner left him, and at times he felt catatonic. But listening to an interview with the Australian painter Johnny Romeo, on the radio, inspired him to return to his passion. “By the end of his interview, I was on my feet, in my cell, working,” he writes. “I’m able now to actually understand how fragile and fleeting life is.” To make sense of his new surroundings, he began to draw what was around him, but instead of depicting the bars and razor wire, he focused on the people.
[For more on this story by MAURICE CHAMMAH, go to https://www.themarshallproject...the-prison-portraits]
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