Curio

State Library of New South Wales
George Gittoes Art Diaries (2001-2014)

George Gittoes Art Diaries (2001-2014)

MLMSS 9589

Commercial sketchbooks with collage, pen and paint.

These heavy sketchbooks have travelled the world with Gittoes, through war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, while working in Berlin, Norway and New York, on holiday and at home in Australia. They have been used as a clearing-house for a mind bursting with ideas. Each diary bears a distinctive graphic cover. Inside, the immediacy of handwriting, mark making, sketching, doodling and collage jumps off the page. The Library’s catalogue describes them as diaries, but they are also artworks, film notes, business records, scrapbooks, family albums.

A Visual Response to the 'War on Terrorism'

State Library of New South Wales has recently acquired visual art diaries from 2001 to 2014 from the Australian artist George Gittoes.  These standard issue sized A3 sketchbooks contain the creative process of an extraordinary artist. 

Painter, printmaker, film maker, performance artist, photographer George Gittoes was one of the artists involved in Sydney's Yellow House and established a career as a significant Australian artist. George is represented in many of Australia’s national collections and in a range of regional art gallery collections.  He has also been recognised through an Honorary Doctor of Letters, UNSW in 2011, awarded an Order of Australia in 1997 and recipients of the Blake and Wynne Prizes.  However since the early 1990’s George has been committed to developing a visual response to the early 21st century's ‘War on Terrorism’.

For researchers now and in the future the visual diaries reveal the germs of ideas that then develop in to fully-fledged creative projects and as with all brainstorming the ideas that got away, hit dead ends and did not evolve. The albums are important for the inspiration of Gittoes art practise but also the dogged hard work and ‘perspiration’ of seeing projects to fruition.  Scrapbook style you see the correspondence with broadcasters, interview questions for the films and shooting schedules butted up against drawings, collages and journal style writing.  

Discipline & Practise

These diaries do reveal that the discipline and practise of keeping a visual diary are central to the creative output of George Gittoes.  The graphic illustrations on the covers – distinguishes the diaries from each other. Looking through more than 30 volumes you are also struck by the sheer consistency of Gittoes work, apart from the subject matter (the political leaders, the war zone or the fashion) the technique of drawing, writing, collating have remained the same.  

More than anything the diaries represent an artist responding to the war zones he is working and living in.  They cement him as a war artist of international repute documenting his struggle to represent in any way possible all that he is experiencing. Gittoes continuous endeavour to reveal the horror and complexity of war is remarkable.