He spent seven years straight in solitary confinement - two years more than the five years of his adult life he spent free "on the streets."
Langnes, 53, will almost certainly die in prison. He has emphysema, a progressive, incurable lung disease. Tethered to an oxygen tank, he can go no farther in his wheelchair than the bathroom adjoining the four-bed room in the infirmary.
For two hours a day, though, the morning hours when he has the most breath, Herbert Langnes is a free man.
For that time, he sits at a drawing board next to his bed and paints.
During the last 15 years, Langnes has produced about 500 paintings - of elephants and egrets on the African plain, parrots in a rain forest, elk or wolves in snowy woods, galloping horses, ships at sea, peaceful brooks, golden fields.
"To paint a bunch of scenes of prison to me would be self-defeating," he said. "My purpose is psychological freedom, so I paint nature and while I'm doing it, I'm out there."
His images of places he has never been and things he has never seen in person are praised by experts and prized by the prison employees and volunteers who collect them.
"My artist," Graterford superintendent Donald Vaughn calls Langnes. Vaughn has a Langnes painting of palominos running across a plain on a wall of his den.
"Our dying nature painter," a fellow inmate termed him.
"He is someone I will always remember," said John Campagna, Graterford's chief psychologist, who has a Langnes painting of a tiger standing near a waterfall.
Campagna sees Langnes' life as a parable: the angry man, the foiled escape artist condemned to life in prison, who found peace and a kind of freedom through art - and the friendship of a remarkable woman.
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