The mid-October sun stole past the blinds of the Ingham County Parole Office on Lansing’s south side. Martín Vargas sat silently in a hard chair, his back to the window, making use of the valuable afternoon light. There were scraps of paper on his lap and paints and brushes on the chair next to him. A ladder was set up nearby.
Vargas was immersed so deeply in a well of focus that a visitor to the office, perhaps on the way to a nerve-wracking meeting with a parole officer, could easily walk past him to the inner door without noticing he was there.
But the art on the wall was impossible to miss.
On Oct. 15, Vargas finished a 34-foot-long, multilayered vision, full of tiny details and sweeping symbolism, that dramatizes the parolee’s journey from bleak, gray-walled prison to bright, blue-sky paradise…