Daniel Bolick never expected to meet his Muse in the darkness he was navigating through. But out of torment came purpose and a clarity about the direction of his artwork that has taken him beyond anything he could have imagined.

The resultant series of paintings and drawings form his solo exhibition, "Resurrected," at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg. At 7 p.m. tomorrow he'll give a free gallery talk, "Damnation to Redemption," about his own path and those of the exonerated prisoners he depicts who once sat on death row or faced life imprisonment.

It's a subject that people don't want to talk about, and when they do they find reason to excuse the legal system's faults or to blame the accused, Bolick observes. But artwork taps an emotional nerve. "I saw a couple of tears during the opening," he says.

Ten individuals are depicted, one of whom was living in Braddock when convicted; the others are from New Orleans. Six were on death row for murder; the others had received life sentences for second-degree murder or rape.

The paintings are large, half of them measuring 61/2 feet in height. "What happened to them was monumental," Bolick says, "and I wanted to paint them that way." He also wanted them to be confrontational, surrounding the viewer in the small gallery.

As dramatic are smaller drawings of the men accompanied by texts that relate their harrowing stories. These are synthesized in the painting titles, as for the only Pennsylvanian represented: "Drew Whitley -- Sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder he did not commit. Exonerated after 18 years."

Whitley had been convicted of second-degree murder in the 1988 shooting death of Noreen Malloy at a McDonald's near Kennywood. Dubious witness accounts, coupled with DNA testing in 2006 that showed crime scene hair samples weren't Whitley's, led to his release.

Bolick, a Mount Washington native, loved being an inner-city art teacher for the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and would probably still be teaching, he says. But things turned sour. He began to experience attitudes in the classroom that he hadn't seen in 34 years of teaching, and by his last year he felt his school was unsafe to work in.

In the meantime, Bolick had begun painting portraits that were inspired by his "very spirited" students, the canvases activated with dripping runs of burning color. "I began to paint anger. It was very cathartic for me."

As he worked through almost 40 of these, he developed the emotional, expressionistic style that infuses his exonerated series.

Bolick retired from teaching in June 2007, not realizing that the journey had only begun.

Two of the paintings were jurored into the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh 97th Annual Exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art later that year. One of them earned him the Westmoreland Museum of American Art Exhibition Award, a prestigious solo show at the museum.

John Carson, Carnegie Mellon University professor and head of the art school, selected another painting for the 98th Associated Annual at The Andy Warhol Musum, and gave it the Juror's Award.

Bolick was on a roll, but that brought its own set of problems. He had more than a year and a half to prepare for the Westmoreland show but had to decide what to do. Making the paintings and retirement had eliminated the tension. "I no longer had that anger."

But he did have a desire to do something with an activist content. Bolick was an undergraduate at Kent State University in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four of them and wounding nine. "That changed my entire life, what I witnessed that day."

He decided upon the "innocence movement," a national project to help wrongfully incarcerated prisoners, and contacted Bill Moushey, founder of the Innocence Institute of Point Park University. Moushey agreed to tell local exonerees about the project. After a month without response (Whitley came on board later), Bolick searched the Internet and learned about "Voices of Innocence," a play written by four New Orleans death row exonerees.

"They had already taken their experience and turned it into art," and Bolick reasoned that would make them more open to his project.

Two trips to Louisiana later, Bolick had the subjects he was looking for and a cooperative community to learn from, spearheaded by exoneree John Thompson who founded Resurrection After Exoneration to provide transitional support post-prison. (Thompson, who slipped by seven execution dates, was exonerated after 18 years in prison when a prosecuting attorney admitted having concealed evidence that would have proven his innocence.)

There are three points Bolick hopes to make with this body of work, which he sees as ongoing.

He wants to humanize these men, and to make people realize this can happen to anyone. He hopes to influence legislative change so that the exonerated receive compensation when they leave prison. "The one thing these men wanted when they got out was an apology. They don't even get that." And, he's making an anti-death penalty plea.

"How many people have we killed in the country in the name of justice who are innocent?"

At noon July 22, Bill Moushey will give a free talk about the "Innocence Movement" in the United States. Since the Institute was formed in 2001 to investigate cases of wrongful convictions in Western Pennsylvania, it has exonerated 14 individuals. He is a Point Park associate journalism professor and former Post-Gazette reporter who, in 1997, won the National Press Club Freedom of Information Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.