Convict’s golf art masks his reality
Artist says he’s innocent
Associated Press
ATTICA, N.Y. — Valentino Dixon’s colored pencil drawings evoke carefree days on the links, dewy greens, open spaces, fresh air enlivened by flowers and crisply trimmed fairways.
But the artist has never set foot on a golf course.
For 22 years, Dixon’s world has been concrete floors and metal bars.
It is nothing like what appears on paper as he runs rainbows of pencils down to nubs on blades of grass, reflective ponds, sweeping branches — all the while hoping that someday it will exist for him outside of his imagination. Outside the walls of Attica.
Hope hinges on Dixon’s efforts to overturn his conviction for a murder that another man confessed to: the Aug. 10, 1991, shooting death of 17-year-old Torriano Jackson in Buffalo.
Proclaiming his innocence through evermore legal motions and appeals, Dixon draws, spending 10 to 12 hours a day illustrating a kind of serenity he has never known.
“They’d have run me out if I talked about golf,” he said during a recent interview inside the maximumsecurity prison, recalling the tough city streets where football and basketball ruled.
He knew early on he had a talent for drawing, copying comic strip characters so perfectly his mother thought he’d traced them. An elementary school teacher guided him into Buffalo’s Academy for Visual and Performing Arts for high school. But one class shy of a diploma, he entered a world of drug dealing and guns.
Dixon, now 43, knew trouble was brewing that night in 1991. But he said he was inside a store buying beer when he heard the shots that would send four victims to the hospital. Torriano Jackson was shot 27 times.
Out on bail with drug and weapons charges pending, Dixon went home and went to bed. He was arrested the next day.
When investigators disregarded a confession by LaMarr Scott, 18, saying it was coerced by Dixon’s family, Dixon was on his way to trial and a sentence of 39 years to life. He’s eligible for parole in 2030.
Since his conviction, several witnesses have come forward to say Dixon was not the gunman, and he has passed a lie-detector test, all part of his bid for freedom.
Sitting in his prison cell in 1998, Dixon picked up the pencils an uncle had sent him and, for the first time in about a decade, began drawing. Animals, landscapes, people. When then-prison Supt. James Conway gave Dixon a picture of the 12th hole of Augusta National, home of The Masters, and asked if he would draw it in 2009, something about it spoke to him.
“I’ve been drawing the golf courses ever since.”