TRIBUTE: Heroically Beautiful, Bruce Goold (1948-2025)
For a short time in the early seventies, boring old Sydney Town had a place to go that fitted Bruce’s vision. After living and successfully exhibiting in London and Dublin, Bruce moved to Palm Beach in 1990 with his wife Kate and young daughter Nancy. Nancy describes him as being like a lyrebird, “Dad was […]
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Tagged Bruce Goold, George Gittoes, The yellow House
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Camel Milk
The SS Club has been like a second home to me for the last 20 years. It is a strange place caught in a surreal time bubble as it was set up by the Nazi SS when they were searching for the lost Arian tribe. There is a shooting gallery in the basement which still […]
George Gittoes: Ukraine Guernica
The internationally renowned artist George Gittoes has no qualms in catapulting himself into dangerous, hyperreal war zones. He has been doing this for the last fifty years. The unstoppable Gittoes with his wife and collaborator, artist Hellen Rose, left the haven of their Werri Beach, New South Wales, home soon after the news came in […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine Guernica
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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 […]
HANDS
The potters work long days in the mud with their hands and feet hardly ever going outside their ceramic world. The pottery compound reminds me of the set of Tatooine from first episode of Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker grew up. George Lucas imagined Tatooine as a place as ancient and as unchanged as this. […]
Blue Poles and Doors of Perception
I have read a couple of biographies of Pollock and the man disgusts me. I have a huge collection of art books but never felt the desire to buy one with reproductions of Pollock’s paintings. He was someone I didn’t think I could learn anything from except that art is at its best when it […]
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Tagged Blue Poles, Dispatch series, Doors of Perception, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose
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Flourishing Yellow Houses
I have been out and about in the market a lot buying things to equip our two Yellow Houses and am constantly moved by the sight of young, former Taliban fighters, who have been released from duty and are now trying to adjust to a life where they do not have to hide in caves […]
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Tagged Afghanistan, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Yellow House, Yellow House Jalalabad
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CAN ART MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
I am back in Afghanistan and I am more certain than ever that the kind of socially committed art and teaching we doing at our Yellow House is making difference to many lives here as well as informing the outside world . . . We are proving, in a very real way, that art and […]
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Ukraine Guernica – Artist War
Winter Light Photographers and filmmakers call the last hour of sunlight in the afternoon the “magic hour” because colours glow with their fullest intensity and are no longer washed out by the intensity of reflected sunlight. It is the same in mid-winter when the sun is at a low angle all day. People caught up […]
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Tagged Dispatch series, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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American Knife: A Jog and Black Crosses
One time in Chicago I went on a quest for a serrated bread knife. Shop attendants looked at me with fear in their eyes, shaking their heads when I told them what I wanted. I finally found one in a locked cabinet at a hardware store. Two security guards were sent to unlock it and […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, MOMA, Poland, Ukraine, US politics
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Straight Herd
Artists are non-conformists and, from childhood, society tries to force them to conform. The most original are accused of madness. I am here using the term artists for all creatives – painters, musicians, poets, writers, dancers, photographers, actors and filmmakers. The herd has found a way to flog artists and feel ethically superior to them […]
Ave Libertatemaveamor
I discovered German Expressionist artists like Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, George Groz and Otto Dix at high school and immediately felt they were like what I wanted to become. But I would need a time machine to be among them. I imagined what it would have been like to sketch at the same café table […]
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Tagged Ave Libertatemaveamor, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian art
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George Gittoes: 6/10/22 – The New Yellow House
In 1972, Jane Fonda was the hottest actress in Hollywood since Marilyn Monroe until she was photographed posing on an anti-aircraft gun in Vietnam. Despite being the star of Cat Ballou, Barefoot in the Park, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Barbarella, and winning an Academy Award for Klute she was blacklisted by Hollywood for the […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Yellow House Jalalabad
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Letters from Ukraine: 25/06/22 – Bonnie and Clyde
Kate took a platform snap of Hellen and I leaning back on the departure train from Kyiv – it was like the shots of Bonnie and Clyde posing with their guns against a getaway car. We have that outlaw look. I often say that what we do is not much different to robbing banks. Back […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 12/06/22 – Looking Glass
I was about twelve years old and out on a Sunday picnic in the Royal National Park with my parents and grandparents. Nana set out the picnic next to a river because she knew I would be entertained by catching yabbies. I would put a piece of rotten meat on a string and coax them […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 5/6/22 – Interior
An eighteen-year-old with a gun in Texas was the tipping point that drew attention away from Ukraine. This war has slipped from the front of the news and the networks have cut back their presence, bringing many of their crews back home. For a period the only people we saw in the Maidan, besides Ukrainian […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 14/04/22 – Guernica Village
Kate, who is our assistant on this project, is a horse and animal lover. Before the war she was a show-dog trainer. Her passion is dressage. The horse she rides, Chestnut, is stabled at an animal centre in the village of Lukyanivka. When Kate told us that the stables had been attacked by Russian missiles, […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 05/04/22 to 09/04/22 – Remains
BORODYANKA On Tuesday we followed a convoy of animal rescue ambulances and trucks to a pet shelter in Borodyanka. The dog rescue team has several very well-equipped animal ambulances: two white and three red with silhouette profiles of a dog and a cat superimposed under the name “STAR.” The lead vehicle is a large red […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 04/04/22 – Ladies of Kyiv
As we walk around exploring the world, it is like having a dream then waking up to find that its real. We visit small shops that are still open to get supplies. Each store has different things that the other hasn’t got, but these places are a gathering point for the locals, also becoming a […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 03/04/22 – The Rock
There is a sense of possible victory in the air that is rising with the spring tulips that are beginning to push their way up from the soil. When we got on the train, with Kyiv as our destination, we did not know if we would ever get out, and each day seemed like we […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 1/04/22 – Saint Jon in Kyiv
Before I knew my friend Jon Lewis was dying from dementia, I met up with him in Sydney and walked over to the Mitchell Library, where he was proud to show me his exhibition of street portraits. I miss Jon deeply and wish he was here in Kyiv. He would be out capturing the faces […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Ukraine
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Letters from Ukraine: 31/03/22 – Russian Roulette
When Hellen and I arrived here a week ago, today, every hour felt like we were literally playing Russian Roulette with our lives. Bombs and missiles were raining down all around Kyiv and the TV news was anything but heartening. The good news is that we have found our feet and begun to think this […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 29/03/22 – Guardians
Over the last week we have become familiar to the Ukrainian soldiers at the corner of our street and Maidan Square – have grown used to us passing. I decided today was the right time to make friends. If the Russians get this far into Kyiv it will be block-by-block street fighting, and these will […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 27/03/22 – Vodka
When I was nineteen in New York in 1968/9, I got a job at IBM and my boss was Mr Wallager (not sure of the spelling, and I never knew his first name), who was Russian. He was a wonderful, kind man who let me get away with murder. My job was to illustrate investor […]
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