We asked painter Tony Shore, whose gritty new images of gang violence and street crime are on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery, whether he'd been watching too much TV lately - specifically, The Wire, HBO's police drama about gang violence and street crime in Baltimore.

Not at all, Shore replied. Over the past few months he's been far too busy making his signature acrylic-on-black-velvet paintings to watch TV.

Still, since winning the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts' $25,000 Sondheim Artscape Prize last summer, Shore has taken his painting in an unexpected direction.

For years, the 36-year-old artist based his portraits and genre scenes on the lives of his working-class family and friends in Southwest Baltimore's Morrell Park neighborhood, where he grew up. And he painted on black velvet - a medium then associated with kitschy images of rock stars and sports cars - in part because those were the kind of paintings the people he grew up with had on their walls. He wanted his paintings To honor the artworks they thought beautiful.

And though he didn't idealize his family, he portrayed them with sensitivity and compassion.

In his new exhibition, however, violent crime takes center stage. The most shocking paintings show victims being stomped, beaten and pummeled by gleeful gangs of thugs.

Why have you turned to depicting violent crime in your recent work?

For me, this body of work was definitely new. I was actually quite unsure of it, of where it was going, and though I had some idea of the basis for what I was doing, it's been interesting hearing from other people what they see in it, because it's so different from anything I've done before that I'm really still learning about it myself.

One thing that might help explain it is that I traveled to France a year ago and visited Paris, also Amsterdam and London while I was there. I thought I was hunting down old Dutch paintings, but what the trip really did was lead me back to [the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter] Caravaggio. I was drawn to his group scenes, especially the violent ones with beheadings and the like. Between those and the still-lifes I saw I really got into the idea of using the objects in a painting as metaphors.

In your earlier work, you used your relatives as models. Are the people in the crime scene pictures related to you too?

Some of the images are of my family, and some aren't. But they're all based on things I saw or heard of when I was growing up. My family may or may not have been involved in the incidents I describe, but I was there as a witness. I've also seen similar things since I've been back in Baltimore [after living in New York]. I've actually witnessed several beatings in Morrell Park similar to what's in the paintings. My parents still live there, so I'm over there quite a bit.

What's the relation between the pictures you're making now and the Old Masters you saw?

In the Frans Hals Museum there were all these Dutch tavern scenes with groups of men drinking and fighting. There's an artist named Adriaen Brouwer, a 17th-century painter, who I was very impressed with. He was kind of a carousing guy, hanging out in the taverns with his friends, and he painted the fights that would break out when they all got drunk.

I think of the things I see today in Baltimore as modern-day equivalents of that. The people I know are like that. On the other hand, when I look at paintings from art history I often think: How could that be portrayed in modern-day terms? So that's the connection I feel between Caravaggio's beheadings and the brutality of gangs today.

Given the subject you've chosen, who do you expect will buy these pictures?

I'm not sure [laughs]. Like those old Dutch paintings, my paintings document a time and place. So the same people who would be interested in images that are specific to a particular time and place, that document history and show what life was like, they're the ones who might like my paintings. They're the same people who would be interested in documentary photography, maybe, though photographs are cheaper than paintings and a lot faster to make.

But even though these are very aggressive images, they still deal with this sense of beautiful light.

Some of the best art that has survived history probably wasn't made to be sold right away. I'm thinking of a painter like Leon Golub, who painted these amazing images of mercenaries and war and violence. They're paintings that won't necessarily look pretty above your couch but they stand up as great art. I'd like to hope my art could also do that someday.

Why did you include still-lifes in the show?

I like the idea of using the objects in the paintings as personal metaphors. Each one of the still-lifes has a little story around it.

For instance, the painting of a lobster on a platter plays on two levels, one superficial, the other a little deeper. I called it Lobster (Apologies to Jacob Lawrence) because when I was at Skowhegan [artist colony] in 1996, Jacob Lawrence, who was then in his 80s, was one of the resident artists there.

It's a place that has a history of artists getting a little crazy and wild, so on the last night we had a big bonfire and lobster dinner. At the end of the evening a number of the artists went and broke into the kitchen, where they stole all the leftover lobster and cooked it over the fire. The next day, people were running around saying someone had stolen Jacob Lawrence's lobsters! Apparently he'd been saving them to take home the next day. I felt so bad I actually confessed - but nobody else did. Anyway, that's the superficial meaning.

Another meaning is, when I was in Maine, we often ate lobster and there's a part of the lobster that's like the mustard in a crab. A lot of people think it's repulsive, but others really like it. So I was thinking about all the things that people find repulsive and that I find endearing when I was making that picture. All the still-lifes have these kinds of little stories that go with them.

So were you influenced by The Wire?

I don't have cable. I was painting right up to when my show opened this month, so all the paintings were made after the Sondheim Prize Exhibition went up [in June]. I had seen the first two seasons of The Wire but not the last two; some friends gave them to me later on DVD. Now I'm caught up through the fourth season.

I think there's always been a recognition of the same social issues The Wire deals with in my work. Even the idea of painting on black velvet implied some social awareness of class. Because I'm definitely not painting society's upper crust; the people I'm painting are people who are struggling to get by. Part of my task as an artist is finding value in them, not by just painting happy faces but by painting them for who they are and their world for what it is. It's difficult to say my art is about these big intellectual ideas; that sounds cocky when I'm just making paintings. But the possibility that a painting can evoke those ideas is something that's always interesting to me.

How much does your work reflect the way you view your life in Baltimore?

I get to see different sides of Baltimore. I recently moved back to the city from Harford County, in large part because I wanted to be part of the city's revitalization and not give up on it. It's easy when something is broken to just walk away. The city is definitely broken, but there are a lot of people willing to put forth the effort to fix it. Moving back into the city was a way for me to help.

It's not that I'm going to fix the city by myself. But I'm going to try to do my part.

glenn.mcnatt@baltsun.com