OVER OR NOT

Captain James Cook sailed the Endeavour into Botany Bay in 1770 when William Blake was thirteeen years old. As a child Blake realized he was a mystic “beholding God’s face pressed against his window, seeing angels among the haystacks, and being visited by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.”

 The reigning Monarch, King George lll was the subject of the children’s nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty.” He would speak in a deranged manner for hours without pause, causing himself to foam at the mouth. A story circulated about King George shaking hands with a tree thinking it was the King of Prussia.

 At the age of twenty-six Blake was inspired by the success of the American Revolution, 1783, and began composing America a Prophecy.  As much as any of the American Revolutionaries Blake wanted to see an end to the despotic reign of King George lll.

Blake befriended the most forward-thinking intellectuals and artists of the day and became a dissident.  He was a staunch feminist supporter and passionate anti-slavery abolitionist.

In a violent incident with a Royal Army officer Blake was arrested and came close to being sentenced and transported to Australia but the judge decided the evidence against him was so obviously manufactured, Blake was freed. Many other opponents to the Monarchy, were “set up” and not as lucky as Blake.  They involuntarily contributed to making Australian Culture what it is. The first George Gittoes to arrive in Australia was a boy who came with his convict mother, sentenced for stealing a blanket to keep her children warm.

In 1788, when Arthur Phillip anchored the First Fleet in Sydney Cove with its cargo of convicts, Blake was thirty-one. Phillip’s mission was to A) transport potential revolutionaries from England’s overcrowded prisons and B) build the Australian colony as compensation for the loss of America.

Blake’s 1992 illustration to Philip Gidley King’s Journal, A Family of New South Wales, depicts an aboriginal family with their fish spears and catch rendered with a classical dignity, at odds with the way the Colonial Authorities treated these first nation people as subhuman and took their lands without compensation.

While Phillip’s jailers were lashing the cat of nine tails across the backs of unlucky white slaves Blake was inventing the use of acid to etch copper plates to enable self-publication of his visionary drawings and poetry.

The established order was being rocked and thinkers like Blake were at the forefront of change.

During the French Revolution 1789-1799, Blake was composing the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. As he was writing, ‘If the doors of Perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite” King Louis XVll and Marie Antoinette were being guillotined.

The bad news from France gave King George, his Tory Government, and the English aristocracy a living nightmare to confront.

Blake’s friend Henry Fuseli painted The Nightmare in 1781 and revisited it in 1790-91. Like Blake Fuseli was a fellow engraver and the prints he made of The Nightmare became the most popular image of the age. Almost every famous, writer philosopher, political activist and artist had a print of The Nightmare on their wall.

It was a time of nightmare and mystical vision. In 1917, the Linnell collection of Blakes found its way to the National Gallery of Victoria through the generosity of the Alfred Felton Bequest. In 1972 I took a train to Melbourne to view them. I was able to turn the pages, wearing white gloves and it felt like we were connected. Blake’s art and writing was evenly split between the mystical and the political and so is mine. The Beast, which I painted when Donald Trump first appeared on the US political scene was directly influenced by Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar, 1795.

The last three years have witnessed some of the most nightmarish days the world has gone through in my seventy-five years of existence. In Blake’s time the despotic Royalty of Europe were being challenged, and that was something good that we all could cheer for. In 2024 our freedom is being threatened by dictatorial monsters with supreme powers. Humanity is suffering from an evil and unprecedented crisis of leadership.

When Blake got older and had more time to think about it, he predicted that American would fall under the control of “the Mercantile Class,” becoming a capitalist oligarchy.

My art resides in the background to the Netanyahu led Genocide in Gaza, the brave forces of Ukraine being outgunned and outmanned by Putin’s Invaders, Kim Jong- Un testing nuclear weapons and the struggles of women in Afghanistan. If Trump wins the November election all could be over for democracy.

The world-wide student protests to stop the slaughter in Gaza are the one thing that enables some optimism. Fifty-five years ago, I joined the anti-Vietnam protests and started my journey, making art to end war. It is heartening to see young people revolting against this new nightmare and I intend to do whatever I can to help them!

For starters Ave and I have begun work on a second graphic novel titled The Nightmare.

Reading Blake’s America a Prophecy poem in 2024 it appears to imagine the nightmare landscape of a nuclear war engulfing the United States, “Surrounded, heat not light went thro’ the murky atmosphere.”  It fits with the images Ave has been drawing as she crouches in the hallway of her Kyiv apartment with her baby daughter, Penelope, as the air raid sirens howl, fearing the Russian missiles could be carrying atomic war heads. A living nightmare.

Appear to the Americans upon the cloudy night.

Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,

Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging Fires!

Albion is sick. America faints! enrag’d the Zenith grew.

As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven

Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood

And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea;

Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge

Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire

With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers

Surrounded; heat but not light went thro’ the murky atmosphere

EXHIBITION 
George Gittoes: Ukraine Guernica
20 April – 23 June 2024 
Hazelhurst Arts Centre, NSW