Vincent & The Snow Monkey

31 July — 14 August 2014

In 1888 in Arles in the south of France the troubled, brilliant Vincent van Gogh painted a number of enigmatic self-portraits. His piercing eyes, staring out of the swirling picture plane, changed the course of art history. The portraits were created in what he called “The Studio in the South”, now better known as the ‘Yellow House’, van Gogh’s utopian vision for an artist collective in the sun. His wish was that artists would flock to his paradise; disappointingly, only one came—Paul Gauguin. For ten turbulent weeks the two robust personalities challenged each other to reinvent painting, passionately working through the nights and days. Vincent’s utopian dream imploded but the works created at the nascent ‘Yellow House’ have a poignant vitality that has resonated ever since.

The power of Vincent’s vision has pulsated in Australia’s extraordinary artist George Gittoes. Impossible to pigeonhole, Gittoes’s multimedia approach has seen him acknowledged as one of Australia’s finest draughtsmen and painters. His paintings, photography, films and diaries have documented so much darkness in the world, from Gaza to Iraq, Africa to Afghanistan. Gittoes has witnessed so very much in his life, too much pain for most to us to bear yet he has never lost hope. Like Vincent in his darkest days, Gittoes has still sought the truth in life and death as he sees it. In doing so he moves beyond the literal into a world of imagery with visions from heaven and hell. Gittoes sees beauty where others see suffering; he sees hope where there is none. Like Vincent, Gittoes is the patron to the underdog; the man with a heart of gold and a message of love. He is making art to change the world.

The works in Vincent and the Snow Monkey are the basis of three intertwined themes that can be seen as metaphors for our world. 

Through a chance meeting in the street with Jalalabad ice-cream seller Noor Gul, a man who bears a remarkable resemblance to Vincent, Gittoes now has his jewel in his own longstanding utopian vision in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. In his own Yellow House, he paints Noor Gul … but make no mistake, this is not a realisation of a belated hippie manifesto. It is a serious campaign to enrich the lives of the locals with art and film in a powerful and relatively free environment inside the walls of the Jalalabad Yellow House. 

Noor Gul joins Gittoes in this time warp as a willing participant in the portraits of himself … or are they portraits of Vincent? It actually doesn’t matter because these paintings are about life, loving life and holding hope in a land of hardship, in a place of death. The Jalalabad Yellow House is not geographically positioned in a fair society. Gittoes the provocateur is at his best when there is an edge to his world. What could be more edgy than creating beautiful things in a place where the powerful religious leaders and warlords are hell bent on destroying anything creative or Western? The beauty that Gittoes creates not only in his portraits but also in his large abstracts that speak of his love of the natural world is nothing short of remarkable. 

Despite the horror he has witnessed and painted, at 65 years of age Gittoes’s ambition is to create images that immerse viewers in an experience as uplifting as being surrounded by Monet’s water-lilies. His Starry Garden was painted in the garden of the Jalalabad Yellow House, with Vincent and Monet on his mind, and is the key to this new beginning.

In 1996 George was invited to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who described his work simply as “all about compassion”. Jalalabad was once a holy place of pilgrimage for Buddhists and the caves behind the Yellow House were once shrines to the Buddhist goddess White Tara. By painting Tara, the symbol of Feminine Divinity, George believes he can help to return her spirit of equality for women’s freedom back to Afghanistan. These are transcendent and visionary works which anticipate the kind of beauty Gittoes continues to create in the face of war and violence. They are an affirmation of his optimism not only for Afghanistan but also the world.

In this exhibition, just as in the Yellow House and all around him, snow monkeys dance. Cheeky and manipulative, they, as the saying goes, ‘Hear no evil; Speak no evil; See no evil’. Gittoes’s monkeys are more than pets; in many ways they are metaphors for the artist. They express humanity’s suspension between amorality and instinctive expression. The monkey has always been a symbol for man’s drive towards social and emotional evolution. In the Vincent and the Snow Monkey paintings, the monkeys dance around the abstractions of landscape that inhabit Gittoes’s imagination. 

This is an exhibition of layers—layers of meaning, layers of imagery. It peels away layers of years all the way back to 1888 and Vincent in Arles and another 2000 to when Jalalabad was a peaceful centre of the Buddhist universe.

 

Ralph Hobbs

July 2014

 

\ Exhibition featured works

George Gittoes

Blue Tara

2013 \ Watercolour on paper \ 105x75cm

Cheeky Monkey Tim Tam

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 30x30cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Family

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 61x61cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Monkey Love

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 61x61cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Noor Gul as Vincent 1

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 151x111cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Noor Gul as Vincent 2

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 151x111cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Noor Gul as Vincent 3

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 151x111cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Noor Gul as Vincent 4

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 151x111cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Relic of Buddha

2013 \ Watercolour on paper \ 120x77.5cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Snow Monkey 2

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 30x30cm

SOLD

Snow Monkey 3

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 20x20cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Snow Monkey 4

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 30x30cm

SOLD

Snow Monkey 5

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 20x20cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Snow Monkey 6

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 30x30cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Snow Monkey 7

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 42x42cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

Three Monkeys

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 60x60cm

SOLD

White Tara

2013 \ Watercolour on paper \ 120x79.5cm

SOLD

White Tara 1 - Awakening

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 152x241.5cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

White Tara 2- Transcendence

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 210x153cm

SOLD

George Gittoes

White Tara 3- The Vision

2014 \ Oil on canvas \ 196x152cm

SOLD

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PEOPLE,

Group Exhibition

29 February — 16 March 2024

Jonathan Dalton

MELBOURNE ART FAIR

22 February — 25 February 2024

Contact Us

to find out more about Vincent & The Snow Monkey .

12 - 14 Meagher Street Chippendale, NSW 2008
Opening Hours
Monday to Friday, 9.00am - 5.30pm Saturday, 11am - 4pm Closed Public Holidays (and Easter Saturday)