Lee Jupina Sr.

(not pictured: 1st row, last 3 columns)

1st row
What • Thirst • Waiting • The Stump • A Mind Game • The Act • Reach • The Third • Brainwave • Untitled • Pressure • Ashes

2nd row
Hell • A Good Day • Into Darkness • No Trust • Darkness of Light • Take a Shot • Faces & Places • Broken Rope • Purification • Look in the Mirror • Burn One • Get That

3rd row
Bugsey • On the Rails • A Good Morning • In the Clouds • Climbing a Wall • Should I or Not• Dripping Atoms • Reflection • Beheaded • Fishing Trip • Dark Cover • Red

4th row
The Fighter • Relax • Stalker • Porcelain God • It’s not what you think • Intelligence • One of a Kind • The Mirror • Just a Bite • No Phones • Nailed • The Wall

5th row
Daylight • Hunter • Rec Time • Locked Up • Destructible • Mouse Hole • Anyone Can Enter • Power • A Lot of Work • She’s Square • What is Your Plea? • One Too Many

6th row
The Ole Mule • The Structure • The Passage • From the Water • The Earwig • A Pint • A Pinch • Under the Stairs • Laborer • The Leak • Running the Mountains • Can’t Resist

At the end of 2012, after more than a year on the waiting list at Osborn Correctional Institute (CI) in Somers, CT, Lee Jupina Sr. made it into the CPA Prison Arts Program workshop held every other Wednesday in the prison library. For the first few meetings he brought in the same slowly evolving drawing, a sniper targeting Osama Bin Laden in Mecca. Why this drawing, and why was it taking so long to compete? It turned out that he was sitting at the same table each class next to his friend, the artist Frederick Gunn, a Muslim. It seemed he’d waited so long to get into the workshop mostly to give this fellow artist a hard time. At least, that is what the workshop collectively concluded.

Lee Jupina Sr. was given a stack of small Bristol board, a handful of ball point pens, and an assignment: make a new drawing every day and use up the pens completely. His first drawing took the shape of a spot of peeling paint in his cell. He filled in that empty, jagged spot with as much ink as he could and went from there, establishing a stark silhouette style to first document the prison, and then on to his own dark, tragi-comical vision/version of the world. With a relatively easy prison job trading pins for the weight machines for prison IDs down in the gym, he was able to complete a new drawing each day, bringing hundreds down to the prison library over the next several years. Often, dark drops of liquid seem to be falling into his drawings from above, “it’s the contaminated world finding a way in,” he says, finding a way to infect his drawings.