Political illustrator Bas van der Schot has won the Inktspot Prize for the best political drawing of the past parliamentary year. He won the prize with his drawing Extinction Rebellion, showing a polar bear with its paw glued to an ice floe. The award was presented on September 26 at the Nieuwspoort Press Center in The Hague.
The five-member jury, led by program maker and presenter Eveline van Rijswijk, chose the winning drawing from 120 entries from 40 artists. Four drawings also received an honorable mention: Diversity from Jip van der Toorn, Mediterranean by Tjeerd Royaards, Our leader by Siegfried Woldhek and Qatar World Cup van Blommestijn.
The jury praises the winning drawing, which will be presented on October 28, 2022 de Volkskrant appeared, because of “the feeling of powerlessness in the fight against climate change” that it expresses. “A climate change that is grasping at a last pointless straw now that its habitat is disappearing due to climate change,” with the polar bear as a “tragicomic activist.” “An iconic and very strong image,” said the jury.
With the illustration, Van der Schot refers to the many activists – climate sticklers – who glued themselves to something in the past year to draw attention to climate change. Activists from Extinction Rebellion have been doing this since September 2022 on the A12 near The Hague during demonstrations against fossil subsidies. On October 25, activist Jelle de Graaf glued himself to the talk show table at RTL late night show Jinek and two days later Het Girl with a Pearl Earring in the Mauritshuis had to suffer. A member of the Just Stop Oil activist group glued his head to the glass in front of Johannes Vermeer’s painting.
Van der Schot is known for his clear, simple and often colorful drawings. He has won the Inktspot Prize twice before. In 2002 he won with a cartoon in which he depicted meeting LPF faction members as clowns: “Agreed: from now on we go for the content,” reads the caption. In 2014 he was awarded for A brief history of the PvdA, a drawing in which a red rooster is plucked and ultimately ends up in a pan: “We have to look for our ideological feathers again.” Van der Schot has been making political cartoons for since 2011 de Volkskrant. He previously signed up for it NRC Handelsblad, nrc.next, Vrij Nederland and the Algemeen Dagblad.
The Inktspot Prize was awarded for the 29th time this year by the Pers & Prent Foundation.