1. George Gittoes has travelled to and worked in many regions of conflict, including the Philippines, Somalia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Bougainville, and South Africa.
57 Facts About George Gittoes
1. 2.
George Gittoes was born 1949 in Brighton-le-Sands, New South Wales and grew up in nearby Rockdale, New South Wales, both southern suburbs of Sydney, Australia.
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George Gittoes' maternal grandfather, who lived in the area, was a semi-professional racehorse trainer, and was a significant influence in George Gittoes' childhood.
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George Gittoes' father, Claude, was a public servant, who rose to be Secretary of the Department of Main Roads.
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George Gittoes completed his schooling at Kingsgrove North High School, and began an Arts degree at Sydney University.
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However, an encounter with the visiting American art critic Clement Greenberg led to George Gittoes' abandoning his studies in order to spend time in America.
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In New York George Gittoes came under the influence of the social realist artist, Joe Delaney, whose work was influenced by his involvement in the civil rights movement.
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George Gittoes worked with another friend, Bruce Goold, to transform a two-storey building in Macleay Street, Potts Point, into a space in which artists, film-makers and performers could both live and exhibit their work.
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George Gittoes' own particular contribution was a psychedelic Puppet Theatre, in which he and assistants performed to enthusiastic audiences, using glove puppets George Gittoes himself made.
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In 1971 George Gittoes, who regarded his work as fine art and was not completely in sympathy with the counter-cultural communalism of others in the Yellow House, broke away from the group.
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George Gittoes had been very deeply affected by the suicide of his girlfriend, Marie Briebauer.
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George Gittoes had met Briebauer in San Francisco, and eventually she followed him to Sydney.
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George Gittoes's death was the first great crisis in Gittoes' life.
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George Gittoes experimented for a time with holograms and with computer-generated images.
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George Gittoes was keen to bring art and performance to a wide audience.
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In partnership with Dalton, George Gittoes now turned especially to documentary film-making, first with Tracks of the Rainbow, a film about Aboriginal children visiting sites of importance to the story of the Rainbow Serpent.
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In 1989 George Gittoes travelled to the Philippines, intending to make a film about women political prisoners.
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George Gittoes began a long friendship and collaboration with Filipino artist Nune Alvarado.
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George Gittoes had painted Cameron in the advanced stages of motor neurone disease, and after his death expressed his grief with the painting, Ancient Prayer, which in 1992 won the prestigious Blake Prize for Religious Art.
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One aspect of George Gittoes' work in this period which differentiates him from most Australian official artists is an enduring interest in and concern for the ways in which the conflict which led to the arrival of the peacekeepers had affected the local people.
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George Gittoes did document the activities of the military personnel he was accompanying, but his vision was consistently much broader.
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George Gittoes worked in Mogadishu and in and around Baidoa, the town in south-central Somalia which was the main base of operations for the Australians.
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George Gittoes documented activities of Australian signallers with UNTAC and painted Sanderson's portrait, but was moved in particular by the stoic endurance of the many Cambodian victims of landmines.
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In 1994, with support from the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General John Grey, George Gittoes was able to visit Australian peacekeepers in Western Sahara, Egypt, Israel and Lebanon.
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Also in 1994, George Gittoes travelled privately to South Africa, to witness the transition to black majority rule and the election on April 27 of Nelson Mandela as president.
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George Gittoes' visit to South Africa coincided with the outbreak in Rwanda of the most concentrated genocidal violence of the modern era.
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Nevertheless, George Gittoes was witness to a tragic epilogue to the original genocide.
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George Gittoes later flew to New York to report to the UN on what he had seen.
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George Gittoes continued to travel to scenes of conflict, but no longer usually with the army.
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George Gittoes had first encountered the victims of landmines in Nicaragua in 1986, and continued to meet them, in Cambodia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
31.
In 2001 George Gittoes made three trips to South Africa, to link up with a retrospective touring exhibition, Lives in the Balance.
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George Gittoes travelled to Israel and Palestine, documenting the ongoing conflict over Gaza.
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George Gittoes was working at home in his studio at Bundeena, on the coast south of Sydney, when the world suddenly changed on 11 September 2001.
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George Gittoes had already visited Afghanistan as part of the Minefields project, and quickly became engaged in the effects of this new war on the country.
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George Gittoes had a commission from the Visible Art Foundation in Melbourne to paint three works marking the 11 September anniversary for the Republic Tower Art Space Archived 10 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine.
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George Gittoes had always been interested in popular culture, but now he saw a new importance in reaching the MTV and rap-music generation of younger Americans, many of whom would be fighting in the war.
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George Gittoes formed a good relationship with local film-makers and actors, and worked with them to direct and produce two films in Pashto, the Pashtun language: Servants and Fire.
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George Gittoes was not done with film-making in Pakistan, but in the meantime he travelled to Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, where he linked up with units of the Australian Defence Force serving in these areas.
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George Gittoes had by now separated from his first wife in 2007.
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In 2008 George Gittoes moved into his Surry Hills studio with Performance Artist and Musician Hellen Rose.
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George Gittoes was assisted now by his new partner, Hellen Rose.
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Jalalabad, in far eastern Afghanistan, has a predominantly Pashtun population, similar to the areas where George Gittoes had been working across the Pakistan border.
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In 2013 George Gittoes suffered from serious health problems, having both surgery for prostate cancer and a double knee replacement.
44.
George Gittoes returned to Sydney in early 2015 and Snow Monkey premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2015.
45.
In 2016, George Gittoes published an anecdotal autobiography, Blood Mystic, combining reproductions of works with reminiscences spanning the whole of his life.
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At the start of 2018 George Gittoes began work on a new, even more ambitious film, White Light, a documentary filmed on the south side of Chicago, co-produced with partner Hellen Rose who is the Music Director.
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Meanwhile, a new direction for George Gittoes has been making Virtual Reality films, using a 360-degree camera, embracing the artistic possibilities of new technology in a way that harks back to his early work with holograms.
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George Gittoes has travelled to many places for his art, including: Nicaragua, the Philippines, Somalia, Sinai, Southern Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, Western Sahara, Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, South Africa, Congo, Rwanda, Yemen, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Russia, Europe, UK, Bougainville, China, Taiwan, Tibet, Timor, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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George Gittoes has highlighted important issues, such as that of landmines.
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George Gittoes's travels have taken him to many dangerous places; he has been in serious danger on numerous occasions.
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George Gittoes has faced traumatic events, such as Kibeho, a subject with which he is still working two decades later.
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George Gittoes has explained the choice to work like this:.
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George Gittoes was awarded the Centenary Medal "for service as an internationally renowned artist".
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George Gittoes was given an honorary Doctorate in Letters by the University of New South Wales in 2009.
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George Gittoes and Rose received the NSW Premiers Award in 2014 jointly for their Services to the Community, recognising the couples co founding of the Yellow House Jalalabad in Afghanistan and the Rockdale Yellow House in Arncliffe, New South Wales.
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George Gittoes is twice the recipient of the Bassel Shehadeh Award for Social Justice.
57.
In 2020 George Gittoes received honorary membership to the Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans' Association Inc.