Recent Paintings from Afghanistan

I am proud to be a Multistylist. Wherever I am, I absorb the culture of the place and create work that is sensitive to it.

As well as painting and drawing I make documentary films that take me deeply into the community as I record the lives of its residents. To voice their stories, I learn their language both visual and oral. I become close, like family and I remain bonded to them after the film is finished, continually return to give ongoing support.

I have loved Islamic Art since I was in High School.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the divine geometry of tiled mosques spreads to fabric, carpet and furniture design. In Peshawar and Jalalabad, I collected the wooden stamps, which are used to decorate fabrics, and applied them to the surfaces of my canvases. I exhibit these stamped paintings, which include portraits of girls and women, around the walls of our Yellow House garden and they are appreciated by both the locals and the Taliban, without question. One hangs in the office of the Ministry of Culture and Information between two Taliban flags. 

In Southside Chicago the street walls are covered in graffiti which, to my eye, dances to the beat of rap music from passing cars. I created a large studio in the basement of our apartment where rappers would come to record their music videos. While freestyle battles raged street artists shared their techniques of using stencils with spray can paint.

In Nicaragua, while making ‘Bullets of the Poets’ about heroic Sandinista women revolutionaries I became an Externalist under their influence. They taught me to see visual poetry in the everyday moments.

For Heavy Industry I walked onto the hot floors of blast furnaces and coke ovens and descended underground to be in the subterranean world of miners. I drew with charcoal and carried large canvases on the roof of my truck to paint beside the workers with their hard hats and realist views about life. The painting and drawing I did needed to connect with their reality and not the refinements of the art world. 

The Kibeho massacre was more like a horror movie than the way war is depicted. At night the terrified, many soon to become victims, believed that Shetani , evil cannibal spirits, had taken human form and were preying on them side by side with gun and machete wielding human killers. During the day they pointed to invisible monsters looming over the dead devouring souls and asked if I could, see them. I couldn’t, but twenty years earlier I had found a book on Maconde sculpture with many representations of Shetani and could imagine them. After the massacre I did not return to Australia but went from Rwanda to Mozambique and spent a week in a workshop of traditional Maconde sculptors to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon I had witnessed. I made drawings of their creations, listened to their dreamtime stories and collecting ebony wood examples of the kind of supernatural beings that had terrorised Kibeho. My Rwanda paintings became a mixture of the supernatural with experiences that had been too real. ‘Rwanda Maconde’, for example, combines human features with distorted Shetani form.

When I was in Baghdad making ‘Soundtrack to War’ I was influenced by the music the soldiers played to remind themselves of home, from rap to heavy metal. This American music contrasted with the music local Iraqis played to remind themselves that their culture could not be broken by the guns and the bombs of invaders. My Iraq paintings have collage elements that reflect this clash of Cultures. 

In Cambodia in 1993 I settled into a Khmer Rouge controlled village hut in Siem Reap. It was a short bike ride from the ancient Hindu-Buddhist temples of the Bayon and Ankor Wat. The people I drew and painted were mainly beggars disabled by landmines and the ancient temples were the background. The huge stone carved faces that surrounded them influenced the portraits. The hundreds of skulls and bones piled together inside bamboo shrines, as improvised memorials to the dead of Pol Pot’s killing fields, merged in my mind with the gigantic ancient stone heads. In my painting ‘Death and the Boy’ an orphaned boy stands in front of a skull shrine which contained the skeletal relics of his family. His head is enlarged and his features resemble those of the ancient carvings of Vishnu. 

In Ukraine Putin wants to deny that the Ukrainians have an independent culture and directed his forces to destroy cultural institutions like the House of Art in Irpin. Hellen and I worked with local artists, curators and musicians to return exhibitions and performances to the ruins. Our styles merged into a group style like the works of the German Expressionists during the dark days of resistance to Hitlers Nazi Germany,

A retrospective of my life’s work could resemble a mixed exhibition of many artists, but it is all the same artist, George Gittoes. Consistency is not in the style but in my commitment to witnessing a phase in human evolution which will end with the end of war. I am proud to be a Multistylist.