Rendered in luminous orange tones, the Robben Island church is the beating heart of Mandela’s sketch. Although prisoners were not allowed to enter the church, the warm hues of the work express the spiritual freedom that Mandela associated with the building. He explains in The Motivation: ‘[i]t is true that Robben Island was once a place of darkness, but out of that darkness has come a wonderful brightness, a light so powerful that it could not be hidden behind prison walls, held back by prison bars or hemmed in by the surrounding sea’.
