Blood Mystic by George Gittoes, a memoir of the art of violence

Art and violence were both part of George Gittoes' upbringing: in the earlier, more straightforwardly autobiographical sections of this book he tells us the first was an inheritance from his mother and her mother, while the violence came from his grandfather, a transplanted Ulsterman and hard man of the turf who wanted George to be tough above all things. A representative story: when this project looked to be a success Grandfather Halpin paid a couple of older boys to waylay his grandson because the young tough George needed to know what it was like to take a beating.

Although he won art prizes, he was also dyslexic and rebellious, but made it to Sydney University, where Bernard Smith showed his paintings to the visiting Clement Greenberg, who told him to go to New York. There he gained an ideal of commitment from the black artist Joseph Delaney. But this was already on his mind: at school he had written to Mother Teresa, who advised him to use art to glorify God's creation.

He hasn't quite followed that advice. Instead, Gittoes has spent his career documenting the horrors God's creatures inflict on each other. Once the '70s and Sydney bohemia – Martin Sharp and the Yellow House – are out of the way, Blood Mystic becomes an illustrated catalogue of the trouble spots where Gittoes has painted and made films: Nicaragua in the 1980s, Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and, in this century, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where he has opened another Yellow House to provide a safe space for artists in a part of the world where art is always under threat.

The title comes from an encounter Gittoes had with a Greek monk at the Monastery of St Catherine in the Sinai desert; Gittoes certainly sees it as some kind of benediction on his high-impact way of life. The anecdotes from the war zones or, for that matter, everyday Jalalabad, are often hair-raising and sometimes obscene, as are some of the photographs he reproduces. They would have to be to live up to Gittoes' self-mythologising tendencies. These are the events that motivate all that strident, expressionist imagery, all those grimacing faces, clawed hands and machete-hewn flesh: he is one artist of whom you can't say the emotion in the paintings is unearned. In fact, there is more in the life than could ever be painted, and so the book isn't simply an artist's memoir but another part of the documentary project.