The WikiLeaks founder is the unlikely subject of a finalist in this year’s Archibald Prize. Here's how artist Shaun Gladwell covertly sketched him inside the walls of Belmarsh Prison.
One of the key entry requirements for the prestigious portrait prize is that subjects are painted "from life", with artists conducting at least one in-person sitting.
There was another hurdle for their prison visit/portrait sitting: Visitors aren't permitted to take anything into Belmarsh — not even a sketchpad or a pen. And if the guards notice you doing anything they deem "outside the parameters of the security regime", they're likely to kick you out. So Assange suggested a plan B.
“We found a creative way of getting an image out of the prison,” says Gladwell. "They came up better than Kit Kat. You put them in your hand and they melt really fast," says Gladwell. "I thought, 'What would scientific journalism look like as a portrait?' … So I put a lot of the visual data on the canvas, and actually put it in his face."The finished work depicts Assange as a hot air balloon, with his eyes peeking through a slit, as if he is looking through a prison door.
Gladwell is a former war photographer, and spent time in Afghanistan between 2009-10, around the time WikiLeaks published thousands of classified documents exposing human rights violations in US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."It was like seeing myself dying. Two Reuters journalists were shot down by a helicopter gunship because they were misidentified, because their cameras looked like firearms, and I thought, 'Oh my God, that is exactly the same camera as I had,'" he says.
“I wanted to paint this portrait out of an immense respect for Mark ,” Gladwell said in his 2015 Archibald submission.He describes the process as long and emotional, adding "most of all for Julian and his family".
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