A visual art piece featuring lines from the poem “For a Bail Denied” in the book Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts poem, painted using the dye from M&Ms shells as paint.
Making Art Inspired by Felon and a podcast with Nicole Fleetwood, by Maleah Orr
To create this piece, I took inspiration from a podcast with Nicole Fleetwood as well as a poem from Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon. When reading Felon, a lot of the language in the poems really inspired me, and I knew I wanted to create something that focused in some way on his words. The poem, “For a Bail Denied,” had a stanza that really stood out to me:
“someone wailed & the boy’s mother yells:
This ain’t justice. You can’t throw my son
into that fucking ocean. She meant jail” (12).
I couldn’t stop thinking about jail being compared to an ocean. The water suffocates and drowns. There are dangers like sharks. The ocean seems never ending. One can get lost at sea. The more I thought about this poem, the more I knew that I wanted to create a piece inspired by it. When I listened to the podcast on prison art that featured Nicole Fleetwood, I got even more inspired. In the podcast, Nicole Fleetwood talks about how incarcerated people that work in visual arts have to get creative with their color palettes because they are working with limited materials. She said that they often use foods, like Kool-Aid or M&Ms, to create paints. I decided to create a visual art piece featuring these lines from the Betts poem, all using M&Ms as paint.
This task involved some challenges. I used a pencil to do a quick sketch and paint brushes to apply the color. These might be supplies that incarcerated people have limited access to. Still, painting with candy was hard. It took a lot of effort to get real pigment from the dye. The best method I found was to hold a bunch of M&Ms of the same color in my hand, dip the brush in water, and then swirl it around in the candy I was holding. Some of the dye dripped from my hand onto the paper, and I dropped some M&Ms onto it a few times. This was a super messy project, and my hand is still dyed blue. In the end, I have a better understanding of how difficult it is to create art while incarcerated, and I have a newfound appreciation for all of the pieces that come out of these circumstances.