The prisoner formerly known as Bronson wants the world to know he has changed. “I’ve done some mad things, I’ve been a nasty bastard,” he says from his maximum security cell in one of the many prisons where he has been incarcerated since being jailed in 1974 for armed robbery (with only a brief spell of freedom in the late 1980s). “I have found my true self through my art. I’ve swapped the sawn-off shotgun for the sawn-off paintbrush.”
These days he calls himself Charles Salvador. He even has a Dalí moustache. Auctioneers of his pictures of prison and psychiatric hospital life call him an outsider artist. Nonsense. He’s an insider, though that may change.
