IN a crowded exhibition hall, Paul Ashton is showing me a colourful painting of Tony Blair in a hooded top which he sent to Downing Street earlier this year.
“It was around the time that they were attacking people who wear hoodies and I just thought the whole thing was stupid,” he says. “I wear a hooded top sometimes I thought I’d send him a painting of him in one.”
Ashton could be just another artist and the Koestler Trust exhibition just another exhibition, if it wasn’t for one thing. Ashton is currently a resident of the Tony Hillis medium secure unit for people suffering with personality disorders.
That fact is what makes the Koestler awards, now in their 43rd year, unique.
All the art on display – and there is a huge range of every conceivable art form – is done by men and women held in our prisons, young offender institutions and other secure units, ranging from Broadmoor to Holloway.
This year, as Baroness Scotland of Asthal, QC, minister for criminal justice, opened the annual exhibition that marks the event in St Mary Abbott’s Hall in Kensington, the invited guests and VIPs were able to take in some of the 4,000 entries for the awards, submitted from prisons and institutions around the country.
One particular image that caught my eye was a striking portrait of Hollywood icon Al Pacino (‘You can Call Me Al’, see page 1) which seemed, with its haunting eyes, to effortlessly capture the essence of the man. (The names of the artists are not released by the Trust.)
But there was everything from the quirky to the classical – from Andy Warhol inspired collage-style paintings to more sedate figurative art. What is striking also is that all the artwork is anonymous with a simple tag listing only the title of the piece and the name of the institution its creator is from.
The idea behind the awards, founded more than 40 years ago by, journalist, author and campaigner, Arthur Koestler, is simple. It was an important tool for prisoners trying to combat “the death of the spirit”.
It was a subject Koestler knew something about. Born in Budapest in 1905, he had joined the communist party in 1931 and spent three long months in Spanish prisons after being arrested by the fascists in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, he was again arrested in Paris and sent to a detention camp from which he was released in 1940. After a complicated escape he arrived in England – only to find himself confined in Pentonville for six weeks as an enemy alien.
Koestler died in 1983 but the awards have gone from strength to strength. There are now 62 categories from the original two for painting and literature and a permanent home for the scheme appropriately sited in an old hostel at Wormwood Scrubs. And his belief in the redemptive power of art holds as much currency as ever. As Lord Ramsbotham, former chief inspector of prisons, and current chairman of the awards says: “Education is at the heart of the process of rehabilitating prisoners and the arts has a huge part to play in the process.”
Rachel Billington, daughter of Lord Longford, the great campaigner for penal reform and a special guest at the event and Peter Fewell, a former prisoner turned author, both spoke movingly of the power of art to forge new bonds and increase self-esteem.
Paul Ashton, who lived on the streets for 20 years before being taken into the unit, agrees.
“I was tired of my life,” he says. “I had been painting all my life but this was the first time I was able to work with tutors and to have my work exhibited. It has given me enormous satisfaction and a sense of purpose. My dream now is to have my own art studio one day.”

• The Koester exhibition is on display at St Mary Abbots Hall, Vicarage Gate, Kensington from 10am to 7pm every day until October 9. For more information contact the hall on 020 7376 9073 or the awards on 020 8868 4044.

An award-winning poem from the Koestler exhibition:

I Wondered

As I stood there staring out of my window
Watching the yellow luminescent lights cascading
Off the football pitch, I wondered.

As I watched the minute amount of grass, green with life
Swaying briskly in a gust of light proportions, I wondered.

As I watched the orange night lights giving off
Their mystic aura against the backdrop of
A dark and gloomy sky, I wondered.

As I watched the sombre buzzard hovering above
The field next to the elongated grey and
lifeless fence, I wondered.

As I watched the calming silvery light of the moon,
Floating through the clouds and
Bringing a bit of life into this frustrating place, I wondered.

I wondered why there is so much beauty
In such a dark place.

Then I knew beauty is everywhere,
In the tiniest crack or the largest volcano.
In the tiniest hamster and the baby elephant.
Beauty is not what we see, but what we make of what we see.