Vale Allan Mitelman (1946-2025)

Cubism
Allan Mitelman

“Here is a question for you. I admire all types of artwork if it is good of that type and this includes cubism done by different artists through the ages. I have tried doing some myself but I’m running into trouble with some aspects of this style when I have used it in some of my themes.

I am an observant person. An artist has to be. Let’s just say that I am walking about in the street. I’m out looking for subjects because I don’t have much on at home that I need to do as I had earlier vacuumed and set up my studio with new clean rags torn from old shirts I know where to get easily and fresh turpentine quite close to one side of my easel and have time up my sleeve…from the shirts.

It’s a clear day and the light is clear too like on a Greek Island where the light is good for getting your chroma right. It makes you feel that you are in business when it comes to your palette chroma selections. But wait, I have forgotten that there is more than palette chroma selection to contend with. Cubism is not just decorative colour arrangements that sometimes are superficial. There’s more to it than that. That’s why it is really revolutionary. With cubism there’s volumes and planes and all kinds of shapes to think about.

I look around. I see a tree. It is not any tree but a tree with a gnarled trunk full of character just like the old man sitting under the tree feeding hungry birds. The old man doesn’t have a gnarled trunk like the tree but his face is gnarled and brimming with character etched deep by time and experience and everything he has seen and done in that time. It is very moving in my mind.

This has been a good theme for many artists and has been tackled in a variety of different but valid styles. Myself, I have done a lot of old men but never when they are feeding hungry birds but then I am looking for something off the beaten track and out of the ordinary to try cubism with this time.

Hungry small birds are good to do because being smaller than the plump ones who are unfair and take bread intended for other birds when old ladies feed them, the slower hungry ones end up small and wiry and sometimes even very wizened and so you don’t have to use as much paint on them unless you want to do them with really thick paint as you would on the plump ones who take the bread from the old ladies that was meant to be shared.

These birds, the hungry birds hop about near old men a lot of the time, sometimes on one leg and some of these men are the same ones who get painted because they are gnarled. Often both of the bird’s legs are ok and not just one being ok and the other bad though they pretend otherwise in order to look sadder than they really are so as to get more bread. A scene of an old man and a sad bird is a very powerful motif and is really replete with poignancy.

But then alors, I see it. I see my motif. Why had I not seen it before? I don’t want to look directly at it. It is too terrible, too terrible because nature can be confronting and extremely intense as well. Near the old gnarled man’s shoe the hungry bird that had been hobbling about on one leg is lying down on one side of its sad thin but feathery body. It is not resting but dead. It had done something from its mouth during the dying. It has done a little tiny hint of sick. It shows that life is fleeting and is quite a good metaphor for a lot of things I am passionate about but I I need to avoid doing any metaphysical types of issues. I wanted this to be the maelstrom vortex of my picture just like both eyes of La Gioconda, the eyes that everyone knows follow you around when you look at them and this would too. Maybe the bird is dead on account of too much bread from the well meaning old ladies who were betrayed by the plumper birds.

This would not be just a pretty picture. It would pull no punches and also would be fecund with some symbolisation. But how to tackle it? The crux was in the bird and not in the old man’s shoe. I knew that I didn’t want to do a pile of cubes and spheres and cones here and there next to that old mans shoe to represent the death of the hungry bird and the actual accidental sick, first because there wasn’t much of it and what was there was like not unpleasant and had been done by the bird accidentally. This was one of the cruxes I mentioned earlier and one of the challenges I faced. How do you do soft things and running liquid type things? How do you do some soup in a saucepan? I can see how you would use cubes and so on, the types of shapes you are supposed to for hard things like cookware. The saucepan you can do with shapes and facets, that’s obvious. If your soup is hearty and like an artisan country type of soup then you could float your spheres and cones and any other shapes you can think of around in the saucepan to represent vegetables and it wouldn’t look out of place but how to do a light consommé representation or even a gas coming out of a stove if you had forgotten to light it when you were doing your soup?

Everybody knows that multiple viewpoints are a speciality of cubism. If you’re doing cubism and are very absorbed and even fascinated with space and time and volume all from different view points, then where are the viewpoints supposed to be? Do you just make it up? How do you know where to set up your painting things and then where to move next for another viewpoint? Art books never tell you this and it’s really important, just as important as space and time and volume. As well, you’re all the time working out where to put your cones and your spheres and so on. How often do you have to move your viewpoints? If some artists know it seems they don’t tell anyone. That’s why it never gets into a book but then why should they when they had to work it out themselves?

You could be dashing round here and there the whole time making puddles everywhere with your turpentine spilling on your hands and as well even on a floor which might have some kind of really good varnished finish, and if you’ve got some sensitive skin you could get rashes, some of them serious and raw and peeling and later even get some discharge if it’s very bad and not treated with the right ointments, and that can sting.

This is where outlays come in and books don’t mention this either because they concentrate on viewpoints and the cones and the spheres. If while you are darting about doing different viewpoints and of course you sometimes have to go quite fast, you might spill turpentine on yourself and need to attend some kind of skin dermatology doctor to fix the rash. This is an outlay and can end up costing plenty especially if they need to use really hard to get and expensive ointment. Good doctors usually use the right ointment in these cases especially the doctors who know artists and want to get in good with them to get their paintings before you get skyrocketing of prices.

The good thing is that very often cubism turns out better with what we call a restricted palette and here you can save, not really save but more like offset some of what you might have spent on the skin and dermatology treatments by buying fewer and even less colours than you would need if you were doing very bright wild beast fauvism or abstracts with a huge number of geometric stripes that are parallel and thin and all done with different vivid colours. If the stripes are thin you need to squeeze more of them into your painting to fill up your substrate which might be canvas or a door but not like one from a log cabin or one with fancy panels with a knocker in the centre but a flat easy to get one.

I have an idea about this viewpoint business. If you are doing a cubism portrait why can’t you ask the sitter to move around the room a lot and often, so as to get your different viewpoints and you could stay in the same spot and so not have any or at least not many spills on your hands or the floor?

I’m not sure how you do this with fruits and vases, the moving around the room I mean. Maybe you could have an assistant move them around a lot while you paint but then you can get nervous with all the activity and frenzy even, and can’t concentrate, or they could stand to one side out of view of the representation and push the fruits and vases around with a length of curtain rod with the curtain taken of and put back on later when the painting is finished and before it goes to a framer.

With this in mind something you need to remember is that if you are doing your own personal cubism of a nude with many viewpoints, I mean a complete nude in winter when it’s cold, and the nude could do with some heating, then you run the risk of your nude, in dashing from spot to spot to get you your various viewpoints while carrying about a bar heater for warmth even one with a long extension cord, can really get injured and bruised and end up with grazes and lesions that take a long time to heal properly if they fall.

Remember that if you yourself are posing in the nude for an artist or a friend or someone else doing a cubist full figure nude painting of you, you should first look after yourself and go slowly and carefully with the heater even if it means that the artist doing you as a full cubist figure painting has fewer viewpoints for their work. They can always give more emphasis to space and time instead of viewpoints. It can still work out quite well and look professional.

Cubism is not for everyone. No one style of art can be. It is all about your own métier and vision and following your own path and what you want to say.”