Watch this short film about painting in prison… | Little White Lies

Short Stuff

Watch this short film about paint­ing in prison with Skittles

26 Nov 2015

Two human hands with green and tan painted nails, one hand holding a green marble.
Two human hands with green and tan painted nails, one hand holding a green marble.
Meet the res­i­dent Da Vin­ci who turns can­dy into art at California’s noto­ri­ous San Quentin penitentiary.

Chris Wil­son was born in New­cas­tle-Upon-Tyne, he lived in Ghana and Tan­za­nia until he was 10, when his fam­i­ly move to Cal­i­for­nia. Then things fell apart: his par­ents split, his dad had a men­tal break­down and Chris was left to fend for himself.

With a junkie’s rap sheet filled with mul­ti­ple counts of resist­ing arrest, over­dos­ing, pos­ses­sion, con­spir­a­cy and bur­glary, Chris did four stints in California’s infa­mous San Quentin prison before being deport­ed to Eng­land in 1998.

Prison, he found, is a place where cre­ativ­i­ty flour­ish­es in many ways. I wasn’t part of any bull­shit gang, I wasn’t Aryan Broth­er­hood or any­thing like that,” he remem­bers, as he paints in his Brix­ton stu­dio. I was freer, I could walk my own walk.”

Some invent gangs to sur­vive, some cre­ate art. Chris, for instance, learned from oth­er inmates how to make paint tints from crush­ing mate­r­i­al that were on hand, like Skittles.

Now on the out­side, he sup­ports him­self as a writer and a painter. He demon­strates for Huck how he cre­ates a cre­ate a palette of colours and fash­ions paint­brush­es by cut­ting his own hair and attach­ing it to bro­ken cutlery.

Cre­ation is a place of free­dom,” he says.

This arti­cle appears cour­tesy of our sis­ter pub­li­ca­tion huck​magazine​.com Sub­scribe to Huck’s YouTube chan­nel for more.

You might like