Margins · George Gittoes
It’s been over five months since Russia invaded Ukraine. VAULT spoke with veteran Australian anti-war artist George Gittoes, who has been on the ground painting and recording the horror since it started.
Image credit: Kate Parunova. Courtesy the artist
In Kyiv’s Maidan Square, the locals have planted tulips where the Russians tried to break their spirits. For Sydney artist George Gittoes, the beauty of this latest foray into the eye of war with his artist wife Hellen Rose has been befriending and supporting brave local Ukrainian musicians, performance artists, illustrators and painters.
“But aren’t you afraid?” asked a sympathetic passport officer in March, just as the war was beginning. She was waving Gittoes and Rose through to a train at Lviv, just across the Polish border where the pair had driven themselves through the countryside from Krakow, now bound by rail for the Ukrainian capital.
But Gittoes, 72 years old, who co-founded the Yellow House artists cooperative in Sydney’s Potts Point in 1970 and has since felt compelled to make art wherever conflict rages – Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan – came out as a mystic in his 2016 memoir Blood Mystic. He professes not to fear death.
“We were recently in Odessa, when it was being heavily bombed, and we were in a basement,” the artist tells VAULT via video conference from his Kyiv apartment loungeroom, ahead of a planned foray into Kharkiv. “A massive bomb went off nearby, and it shook the whole building. We should have stayed in the shelter, but everyone went out to see where the bomb had landed.”
“People lose their fear. Human curiosity and self-respect overcome the need to hunker down and shiver.”
The couple have since seen much suffering, recording the ...Subscribe to read this article in full
