Gittoes now defines each new period of work with a major work in the form of a feature film. His process of making each film is to enter a ‘forbidden zone’ (wartime Baghdad for Soundtrack to War 2003-5, the rapthug black ‘hood of Miami for Rampage 2005-6 and the Taliban controlled NW Frontier of Pakistan, for Miscreants 2007-9).

In a truly unique and extraordinary life, artist George Gittoes has set up studios around the globe and worked in world conflict zones for over 20 years:
“Why do I do it? As far as choosing the roads I have travelled, I have this instinct that if I get comfortable, the work will lose its ‘sting’, so I go out of the comfort zones and into the wilderness to find my art. In the past it was the natural world where predators fed on gentler creatures. In the contemporary context, I go alone into a different kind of human wilderness – Rwanda, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq – not to contemplate nature, but the basics of humanity...”

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The Artist Diaries of George Gittoes

Gittoes major on going work, and the center of all his creative thinking and invention are his artist’s diaries – a series of volumes he has travelled with and worked in – on planes, in bus shelters, refugee camps, battlefields, hotels, great cities of the world, and some of its most remote and unvisited places.

The diaries have become a key exhibition element of his multi media installations – and are integrally linked to his use of various other mediums of photography, film, painting, drawing, writing – the central cog to his creative work and life-journey as an artist.