Many artists from all around the world came out for the support of Ukraine amid the Russia Ukraine war through their own form of art. One such award-winning Australian artist George Gittoes in collaboration with local poet Viktor Solodchuk has created an outdoor mural titled Russian Offensive on a graffiti wall in Hrets’ka Square, Odessa, which according to Gittoes is the most arty and art-oriented city he has ever visited. It’s a 10-meter-long mural that draws inspiration from a bloodthirsty warlord in The Hobbit film trilogy. Solodchuk collaborated on the mural, with his lines of poetry in between Gittoes’s India ink drawings.
According to The Art Newspaper, the central figure of the mural is modelled on Azog the Defiler, a monstrous killer from the film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Gittoes is now planning to create three more murals in Kyiv area in the towns of Irpin, Bucha, and Borodyanka. His wife Hellen Rose is going to film the creation of murals in the towns as she did in Odessa.
Gittoes refers to The Hobbit as the perfect metaphor for what’s happening in Ukraine. Azog (the cruel and bloodthirsty warlord) in the mural refers to Putin, the Russians being described as Orcs and Mariupol likely to be a nightmare scene from The Hobbit.
