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Outlook: An Artist's Last Hours on Death Row

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(L) Myuran Sukumaran and (R) Ben Quilty (credit: Andrew Quilty)

09/07/2018 GMT

An Artist's Last Hours on Death Row

BBC World Service - Outlook, An Artist's Last Hours on Death Row

Australian artist Ben Quilty taught a condemned drug smuggler how to paint

Why one of Australia's top artists taught a drug trafficker on death row in Indonesia to paint self-portraits.

Ben Quilty was one of Australia's most famous painters, when he entered into an unusual friendship with a condemned man. Myuran Sukumaran was a convicted drug smuggler on death row in Indonesia. He was a member of a group of imprisoned Australians known as the Bali Nine. Ben was invited to teach Myuran how to paint, as a way to help him cope with his sentence, and he soon started to reveal an artistic talent. The two men developed a close connection, until it was severed by a firing squad. 

Aleksander Doba from Poland has always been a bit of a daredevil  Olek, as he's known, has kayaked solo across the Atlantic, making him one of just four people in the world to have crossed it by muscle power alone. But he's neither a young man, nor a rich man, he's a 71 year old retired engineer, and he did it all on a pension.
 
Diego Cisneros is a biologist whose life has been heavily influenced by a tiny little frog, which lives deep in the Ecuadorean rainforest. He's been telling Outlook's Clayton Conn how he was bitten early by the ecology bug. 

Image: (L) Myuran Sukumaran and (R) Ben Quilty 
Credit: Andrew Quilty

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