George gittoes essay

The so-called Contra War gave Gittoes his first taste of life on a battlefield, where the stakes were life and death. It was a far cry from the comfortable left-wing protest politics to which he had been accustomed. The trip inspired the film, Bullets of the Poets (1986) and a series of large-scale drawings.

Gittoes’ ongoing endeavour to reveal the horror and complexity of war is unique. George Gittoes is an eyewitness in the world's contact zones. Gittoes is described simultaneously as a figurative painter, a modernist, a postmodernist, a social realist, a pop artist and an expressionist.

George Gittoes is an eyewitness in the world's contact zones. Visiting the battle- and killing-fields of Rwanda, Iraq, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Bosnia and Afghanistan, Gittoescaptures the atrocities and attacks on basic human rights. He produces poignant, rare images of the aftermath of terror, shock and death on the edge of human experience.

His painting The Preacher, winner of the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1995, was completed following his visit to Rwanda in 1995 with the Australian peacekeeping forces. Also an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, several feature films covering the war on terror have been released by Gittoes since 2004.