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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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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VVitches oV KyiV
Our apartment, provided by the Peabody Essex Museum, where the film was screening, is right around the corner from the infamous Old Burying Point Cemetery, also known as the Charter Street Cemetery, which is among the oldest in the United States, opened in 1637. Those accused and convicted of witchcraft in Salem in 1692 were […]
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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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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I Live in a Bombed Apartment Block in Borodyanka
Spending time filming George painting on a wall of a destroyed apartment block in Borodyanka today was like sitting still in a forest as creatures gradually start emerging quietly everywhere. However, the spring flowers here are blooming in a tortured forest of burned monolithic giants, towering totems of torched horror, smattered with occasional blossoms. It […]
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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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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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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: 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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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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Letters from Ukraine: 23/03/22 – Night Train
Our Aussie mate and art collector Mike Haly, who runs a mining company in Poland, organised a thirty-six-year-old executive, Mateusz, to pick us up from our Krakow Hotel and drive four hours to the railway station where trains leave for Lviv. We chatted happily with Mateusz and enjoyed seeing the Polish countryside, as we cruised along at 140 […]
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Hellen Rose: Haunted Burqa
The online festival makes the film freely available here, along with other programmed features. As companions to the film, Rose and her collaborators produced a three-part audio series. Artist Profile is delighted to share the first in this series, “The White Burqa.” Audio credits: Written and narrated by Hellen Rose Musical accompaniment by Fred Gianelli (Psychic […]
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Yellow Submarine to Taliwood: 12/12/21
This era started with watching people jump to their deaths from the Twin Towers on 9/11 and ended twenty years later, close to 9/11, when desperate Afghans fell from the planes at Kabul Airport. We are presently contacting people who lost loved ones who clung to the planes and fell to their deaths. Our film […]
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Yellow Submarine to Taliwood: 11/12/21
Watching footage of crowds running with the huge grey evacuation planes, some made it up onto the wheel hubs. Most were reaching for something to hang onto but one guy was sitting and looking into his phone screen. Was he saying goodbye to loved ones? Was someone desperately telling him to get off before it was […]
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VIDEO: Yellow Submarine to Taliwood
On his connection to the culture of the region, and his projects there, Gittoes writes: “During 1965, while in my first year at a new high school, Kingsgrove North, I dared to suggest to the art teacher that we take the option of studying Islamic art. The teacher tried to persuade me against it, saying […]
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Yellow Submarine to Taliwood: 04/11/21
I took time out this morining to read Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha (1922) again after about fifty-five years since the first reading. Then I had to write about it. This sense of a life journey had been a big element of this journey. […]
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Yellow Submarine to Taliwood: 04/10/21
Waqar was looking very ill when he got back from hospital last night, but assures us the doctors think he is OK and does not have COVID-19 or dengue fever. He does, still, have a temperature of 103 degrees. I will check him when he wakes up. He has been overworking with me – I push […]
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Yellow Submarine to Taliwood: 2/10/21
I don’t accept things the way they are because it is more fun to make them something new. Picasso rearranged form; I rearrange the realities I enter. A few nights ago we went to visit Shah Jehan who is the leading intellectual Professor in Peshawar. I ended up losing it with him . . . […]
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