The big picture
The Journey of Humanity is the world’s largest canvas painting. Dubai-based artist Sacha Jafri raised $62m from the sale of it, all of which will now be given to charity. Here’s what it took to create one of the biggest artistic, social and philanthropic projects of its kind to date
Sacha Jafri’s mother thought he was clinically mad. His father was convinced he was a genius. One of them was right. As a biracial child growing up on the margins in the UK, Jafri relied on a scholarship to enter Eton – never mind that the wealth generated by his great, great grandfather who was a maharaja in India somehow vanished within a few generations – where he studied with Prince William. As Jafri adds, he was severely dyslexic at the time. “The head of dyslexia for Europe chose three people around the world to conduct a case study, and I was one of them.” She found that his normal IQ was so low, it couldn’t be plotted. However, his social IQ was above 200 and also couldn’t be plotted on a chart. “She said, ‘One of the wires in your brain is in the wrong place. You shouldn’t actually be able to exist in this world, because these two parts of the brain do not connect’.”
As a result of the dyslexia, Jafri says that he was bullied and couldn’t really fit in. When the headmaster at Eton summoned his parents – which is when they presented two starkly different reactions to their son’s condition – he also offered Jafri the keys to a porter cabin which would be exclusively his and filled with paint, canvas and an easel. He was allowed to do whatever he wanted there, provided he could make it to all his other classes. That sparked a real interest and the start of his work as an artist. “I then got into Oxford University and got an MA from Oxford, scoring a double first.”
Over the last two-and-a-half decades, Jafri’s had a prolific career in the art world. But it’s also one that he’s tried to desperately get as far away from its traditional trappings as he can. “The art world is full of nonsense. It’s full of smoke and mirrors, manipulations, lies, dishonesty and corruption. Art is seen as this commodity, which is traded, heavily manipulated, and things are hidden away so the value can grow. If you shock people, you get them talking about something for a bit. You then put a high value on it and sell it. People talk about it, but it doesn’t last long. It lasts two months, three months – if you’re Damien Hirst you might get away with it for a couple of years,” says Jafri.
It’s the main reason why the Dubai-based artist has chosen to remain independent and has never signed with a gallery throughout his career. “I want to choose who owns my work. I say no to 90 per cent of the people who want to buy my work, because I don’t want it put in a vault and then sold five years later to make money. That’s everything I’m completely against.”
Tightly controlling the sale of his art hasn’t in any way stopped him from becoming a highly sought-after artist whose paintings regularly sell for millions, and whose collectors include Barack Obama, Madonna, Bill Gates and George Clooney. It was, in fact, a trip with Clooney to Darfur in 2004 during the filming of Clooney’s documentary Sand and Sorrow that set the artist on a mission to use the proceeds of his work for charity. He visited over 42 refugee camps across the world, and has raised more than $60m for charities over the last few years – though he’s now raised the stakes even higher with his latest artwork.
Over seven months from March through to September last year, when much of Dubai was at various stages of a lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Jafri took over the ballroom of the Atlantis – The Palm hotel in Dubai to paint the world’s largest canvas.
That painting, called The Journey of Humanity, spread across 17,600 square feet, was an idea that was crowdsourced from children around the world. Jafri’s team asked children to send their paintings around the themes of isolation and connection, which were then printed onto A3 size sheets and stuck all over the canvas, on top of which Jafri took his paintbrush. “We got millions of children from 140 countries to tell us how they felt in those moments of the Covid-19 [pandemic].”
The finished piece which required the use of 1,065 paint brushes and 6,300 litres of paint, officially entered the Guinness World Records in February recognised as ‘The Largest Art Canvas’. It comprises of five sections: The Soul of the Earth; Nature; Arrival of Humanity; the Solar System; and the Child’s Portal.