SAN DIEGO — A cop goes to a murder scene and sees blood and a body and lots of human tragedy.

Rick Carlson, a homicide detective for the San Diego Police Department, sees all these things and something else too.

He sees the makings of art.

For the last year, Carlson has been going home after his shift and furiously painting murder scenes: murder scenes he remembers from his days as a rookie, murder scenes he is still investigating, murder scenes from San Diego history.

"Sometimes I get obsessed about it," he said.

Carlson's body of work has been collected for a one-officer show, "Murders, He Drew," at Sinbad's Coffee Co. and Gallery in downtown San Diego. Brilliant colors fairly jump off the 20 canvasses, the subjects seemingly more vivid in death than in life.

"I want each one of these victims to tell a story," Carlson said. "I want the public to go beyond the yellow tape (at crime scenes) and see the terror in these people's faces and see what happened to them in the last moments of life.

"For a lot of these people I'm sure it was a relief to die. They were in so much agony, horror or pain that it was a relief."

Carlson became interested in the painterly persuasion while teaching an artist how to use firearms. The artist figured turnabout was fair play, one thing led to another and Carlson began painting.

He was given standard advice: Paint what you know.

That was easy. Death has been his life for several years.

As Carlson leads a visitor on a private tour of his "Murder" show, the artist explains his art.

He points to his first effort, a recollection of his first dead man, a crumpled figure he discovered early one morning two decades ago in a run-down part of town. The man had been stabbed about midnight and slowly bled to death on the pavement.

"It always bothered me," Carlson says, matter-of-factly. "Here was a guy in his 60s, a transient. He died such a lonely death. There all night long, nobody to tell his story to."

He moves to something more current, a husband-and-wife murder-suicide, seen from overhead, the pair slouched in their convertible sports car. "They were both sitting in the car when the family came home and found them," Carlson said. "It was pretty sad."

He continues, a docent of death.

"This one over here, it's another in my medical examiner series," he said. "It's a person who was lying on the examining table and they were measuring a bullet wound in his chin."