Bevan is in his late 50s and describes himself as Aboriginal and Australian. He is a great grandfather as he had his children young, they had their children young, and his grandchildren have recently had children. Bevan has spent 27 years in prison, which doesn’t count the time he spent in boys’ homes from the age of 8. He has struggled with the negative impacts of childhood abuse, which led to addiction issues. However, with support from his therapist, and since learning meditation, finding permanent accommodation, and work, he has been clean for several years.
Describing why he came to the workshop he said, “I came to the workshop to learn more about myself and art and my emotions and thoughts and feelings through doing art, and I certainly got that. I learned a lot about myself through that program we did yesterday. I learned how to connect my thoughts to paper and lines and shapes and my feelings and angriness, and I felt all that caring and empathy, hearing other people's stories yesterday, that also went into my artwork.”
Self Portraits
Me Yesterday
I am a caring and honest person,
I have great community connections
with my work.
I’m learning to love myself more
as each day passes.
I know I am very worthy and
there is a purpose for my life.
I have changed my thoughts,
my ways, and stayed
out of prison.
In essence, I am actually proud of myself.
"This one represents me yesterday. It has my hairstyle, again, my hazel eyes, eyebrows, ears, mouth, nose, with the shoulders, on one shoulder I've got a red circle caption with ‘strong shoulders’. The other shoulder green, it's got ‘weight lifted. Up in my head there's a yellow bubble and said, “Love me and my family and friends,’ and a blue bubble with ‘my mind is clear’. That was me yesterday."
More Self Portraits
Dark Times
"This was a favourite one of mine, it represents where I used to be, my dark times, where I was, where I wanted to be, and where I am. It's got a crooked mouth from when I used to be shifty, with four eyes, because I had eyes in the back of my head, and the third eye that represents the chakra, the third eye. The squiggly lines are all the craziness in life and all this colourful stuff. It’s all the things I've done, the dark times, the sad times, the angry times, the good times, and the anguish. Everything I ever felt is in that picture - all the empathy I felt for victims of my crimes I've ever committed, for the community and for myself, and most of all, for my family and friends that I deprived of having me in their lives."
Now I Can Deal With Stuff
"This one is just in black on white paper. It's got my hairstyle my nose, a smile, wide smile, and it's all in lines. To me, this represents where I'm at today, happy, peaceful. That's why I put the squiggly lines in the circle of the face, because I can deal with that stuff by calming my mind. So that's why there's nothing in my head. Now there's nothing I can't deal with, and I don't worry about anything out of my control, because I can't change that outcome. So, I can just meditate and all that muddling inside my head can just go away."
My Crazy Life
"This one was just representing my heritage and how crazy my life was. That’s why, there’s just lines of black, brown, and red going all over the place. I wanted to use green in there as well for the green and yellow to represent Australia, but I didn't get time. It's basically representing my heritage in my life, my family and bonds I have with other Aboriginal men and families, and for people I've lost. So, yeah, it's all over the place, because that's what my life was."
My Life and Culture
"So, this one represented to me again, same thing about craziness of life and all the colourful stuff is happiness. There's red, black and brown There's red and green for South Sydney, my favourite football club. There's blue on the white for the kangaroos in AFL, my favourite AFL team. There's other colours, bright colours, which represent where I am today, happy and calm and again, the squiggly lines was all the craziness and all the craziness I had in my head, up until I started to learn about myself and get into Buddhism and stuff like that."
My Energy
I Am What I Am
"I've got a big circle in the middle, black, yellow and red on the bottom, representing Aboriginal culture, and yellow and green squiggly lines representing my Australian culture. I've been told by many people in life that I have to choose whether I'm Aboriginal or Australian, and I've come to the conclusion that's bullshit, because my mum was Aboriginal and my dad was white, so I am what I am, and people can't tell me what I have to be. I’ve copped that all my life.
So that's why I've got the white background on the black. That's why I put that so black and white. And from both of those things, I get energy from my ancestral side, and I get energy from the lines, and they're like all roads leading to my white side of the family that we're just discovering."
The Layers of My Life
Layers of My Life
"That's a sun, so sunshine from early childhood, it was very happy and bright. And I remember mum cooking all the time and baking and stuff like that, and always around Nan. But when I got to about seven, it started to get real dark and blue - beatings and sexual abuse started happening to me, and that went on for a lot of years, and then I got to this stage, which is red and green and black. That represents anger, hatred, bitterness, torture, lots of things, feelings of wanting to hurt people. Then there are the green lines for jail and that's my attempt at barbed wire. It represents jail and all the arguments I've seen in jail, all the things wrong with the system, never listening, not teaching us anything - the revolving door system. Then the top layer is orange and yellow, and bright colours red, and that represents my happiness, where I am today, and my bright future is in the middle of that big sun shining. And yeah, it's going to get brighter that that yellow is going to cover all that. It's all going to be yellow, back to where I was in my early childhood."
My Journey
My Journey
"This journey one was interesting. This is the main road where I lived. So, it was black on the outsides from young age, all the darkness and ugliness in life, and then the red, the anger, the green, the prison, the brown, the start of change, all these other roads, all these other off roads, of all these different roads, and all different things I've tried to get clean. All these spiral colours and stuff in between the roads I've taken that's all failure, success, education, learning different methods of how to get on with my life and actually talk about my problems and stuff like that, Theres the colourful areas, and the cross sections obviously represent jail. Then it starts to get really yellow and shiny, and you see the pink, its beautiful. I tried to blend it in the pinky white and the blue sky and the sun shining there again. So, that represents where I'm at today again. And yeah, that road stopped there, and I didn't put any more roads on it, because I'm making my own road now."
My Experience of the Criminal Legal System
The Story of My Life
"I put everything that we learned through the day into this picture. It starts down the bottom with red for Mother Earth, yellow for the sun and black for the darkness. And that also represents my culture for all the brothers and sisters in the world, all the brothers that helped me through jail, mentored me, schooled me, as we used to call it back then. It’s got white on black paper, so black on white, which is what I am. All the pictures are black and white too, as you can see. So that represents me and my life.
I am black, I am white, and that's what it is, and people can't tell me any difference. Then there's a set of bars with my hands hiding it, that represents the time I've done in custody, on parole, state ward homes, boys’ homes, and jail, and even out of prison, my own prison when I first got out, not knowing if I could do it, but it stopped there, and that was five years ago.
So that's why it's up so high. The tree represents how I'm now grounded and rooted and I've set, set my roots. This is very symbolic for me, because those roots are just getting deeper and deeper, and the trees growing, and that tree is me, I'm growing and growing, I'm learning. That picture tells the story of my life, and I've also written on it that:
“I am worthy. I pulled through, I love life. I'm proud of myself, I hate jail, and I'm never going back,” Yeah!"