Entering the studio of a political cartoonist, THEO PANAYIDES feels he is entering another world, where a man against political correctness balanced anarchy with being a civil servant
Right on the edge of Nicosia, off the road to Palaichori, I park outside a nondescript building on a Saturday morning. The ground floor’s been converted into four tiny studio flats, each one composed of an all-purpose room, a minuscule kitchen, plus a single window with a view of the lump of concrete next door. Living there must be deeply depressing, and it’s certainly not where you’d expect to find a well-known name like George Mitides – but George, it turns out, comes here every day, having turned his own studio flat into an actual, artist’s studio.
He greets me at the door, a shambling, bespectacled man in a ratty old T-shirt. His expression is anxious, crowned by a riot of scraggly, curly grey hair, the sense of entering another world made even stranger by the fact that the small room is piled high with portraits of women. They gaze down from the walls and sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor where canvases have been stacked, most of them painted in bold colours, lime-greens and oranges. The effect is a little disconcerting; I feel like I’ve strayed into a room of voluptuous nymphs holding their annual convention. Yet George Mitides isn’t really a painter, though he’s had two exhibitions and is now gearing up for a third. He’s a political cartoonist.
That’s a special kind of art – and an endangered one. The world is full of painters, and they show no signs of disappearing (not that we’d want them to); political cartooning, on the other hand, is largely associated with newspapers – and, now that newspapers are migrating online, they tend not to take their cartoonists with them. Maybe it’s just not so special these days; anyone can publish a cartoon in the age of Instagram. There were three cartoonists (plus George himself) at Mesimvrini in Athens, where he started out in the early 80s; he’s drawn tens of thousands of cartoons – certainly more than 10,000 when you calculate seven days a week for over 30 years, often doing a whole page with 10-15 different gags – but nowadays “I do what I want and publish it online,” he explains, meaning that he no longer works for a paper, posting the jokes on his Facebook and Twitter (@georgemitides). He still churns out a daily cartoon, sometimes two – then comes to his isolated studio, and spends a few hours painting wistful ladies in Gauguin-ish colours.
“Political cartooning is like advertising,” he recalls being told as a young man (he’s now in his late 60s). “You have to be brief, topical and to the point. Later, I realised one more thing which they hadn’t told me – you have to be sharp.” ‘Sharp’ in the sense of being witty, but also in the sense of being caustic, irreverent, not pulling punches. Some of his cartoons are close to libellous – thus, for instance, the one with the answering machine in the president’s law office. “You have reached the Anastasiades law office,” says the caption: “For offshore companies, please press 1. For money laundering, press 2. For passports, press 3.” He’s received some hate mail, especially when ‘mocking’ religion (a big deal in Cyprus), but only once did the subject of a cartoon actually sue – back in 1991, when George skewered a factory in Akaki widely rumoured to be causing cancer clusters in the nearby community. The factory owner had actually taken out an injunction, forbidding the media from broaching the subject – yet the judge found in George’s favour, adjudging that the subject had been broached “for humorous purposes”.
Ah, humour – another thing, like cartooning itself, that’s fallen out of favour in today’s world. “People are more tolerant when it comes to humour,” he claims. “What I always say is that, if you want to see how much freedom of speech there is in a country, check how much they tolerate cartoonists.”
Things have changed though, right?
“Oh, nowadays things have changed a lot! Now, with this ‘politically correct’,” – he says the word in English – “things have changed tremendously. I mean, if you take a subject that you used to write about freely, now you’re worried about being called sexist, or racist, or nationalist or whatever… Now there’s a – censorship, let’s say.”
Freedom matters to George – freedom to speak, freedom to live as he wants, freedom from censorship. His personal hero (apart from various artists whose work he admires) isn’t Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi, the usual secular saints, but Julian Assange, the wacky Wikileaker himself. Yet he’s not a militant; “I’ve never once thought about going to a protest, or throwing stones or anything like that,” he admits. He’s a subversive, seemingly conventional – let the record show that he’s now a retired civil servant, having taught English in the public-school system for many years – yet secretly a bit of an anarchist, a quiet rebel, the low sardonic voice at the back of the class.
Political cartoons, after all, aren’t rants, they’re one-liners. They don’t get up on a soapbox, or ramble like endless social-media posts. Their role is to be more like rapier thrusts, piercing the target in quick, devastating lunges – and George’s own role, he explains, is to be the impulsively honest little boy in the fairytale about the Emperor’s new clothes. “A cartoonist isn’t a political animal,” he notes. “He’s anti-authority. You can’t be a cartoonist and belong to a political party.” In a sense, even though most cartoonists are cynical – it comes with the territory, after years of making snarky observations day after day – they’re also innocents, with a natural mistrust of authority (and hypocrisy) that enables them to see straight away when the Emperor is naked. The kid in the story wasn’t trying to be a smart-aleck, though; he was just sincere, or fearless, enough to say what everyone else was thinking.
George himself seems unpretentious, a quiet sort. Despite being professionally funny, he’s not the type who’ll tell jokes and monopolise the conversation when out with friends. “Not at all! When I was a student, I found that I could be witty, or so people told me.” Not by telling jokes, though? “No, not at all. On the contrary, I’d say I was quite distant, I wasn’t very sociable or anything. When I did say something, I’d throw in a line here and there, if I had something clever to say”. He socialised, in other words, like a cartoonist – and indeed he talks like a cartoonist, i.e. in spurts, umming and ahing for a while before coming up with a pithy response. His personal style is wry, never brash, the opposite of an activist’s – yet he shares the activist’s dislike of authority, “and when I say ‘authority’ I mean ‘authority’, I don’t just mean the government. It’s the government, it’s the Church, it’s parental authority, it’s the employer’s authority over the employee”. It’s political correctness too, however well-intentioned.
And in daily life? Was he also a bit of an anarchist? “I was a civil servant,” he replies with a laugh. “What kind of anarchist could I be?” He actually liked the security of a job in the public sector; he liked teaching, indeed his wife was also a teacher (they married in 1979, and have two sons), liked his pupils – for the most part – and they liked him back. “I can’t say I was very strict,” he muses. “No, not at all…” George was the ‘cool’ teacher who taught the kids how to draw “little men”, in addition to English – then went home and skewered politicians with his pen, like an ink-stained Zorro. Living a double life surely appealed to his sense of the subversive, and amused him greatly. “I remember once there was a movie playing at the cinema,” he recalls, “and I liked the [Greek] title very much, I found it quite symbolic: ‘Schoolgirl by Day, Hooker by Night’!”
There’s another duality in his personality. When it comes to life, he likes it simple; when it comes to art, however, he craves sophistication. George was doing well in Athens (where he lived for 16 years) and only came back because he had to, yet in fact he’s always preferred the quiet, more relaxed life here in Cyprus; he likes simple pleasures, a good film on TV, going out with friends for a drink (he likes his drink in general, though he’s now cut down for health reasons). Yet he also recalls, as a youngster from a working-class family – his dad was a carpenter, his uncles farmers and building contractors – being quite impatient with ‘popular’ culture, and the Cypriot sense of humour.
He remembers a local cartoon from the late 1960s, shortly after Cyprus made a deal with the USSR to import tractors in exchange for raisins and zivania. “Where did you get that?” asked a Turkish Cypriot in the cartoon, addressing the commerce minister who was perched on top of a tractor. “None of your business!” (‘Lamne yirefke!’) replied the minister in heavy Cypriot. (That was it; that was the whole joke.) It was something of a revelation, says George, to go to Athens – he studied English Literature – and encounter the witty political cartoons in Athenian newspapers, in fact it set him on his life’s path. He practised for about four years, drawing ‘little men’ and learning the Greek style of humour – though also learning the art of brevity, being simple, as he says, but “to the point”.
Political cartoons aren’t exactly jokes, more like bon mots, little nuggets of wit. George’s visual style is functional, which is to say he doesn’t try to be artistic – “One little man talks, another answers” – so the caption is everything. “The full moon brings out the werewolves, the crescent moon [i.e. Turkey] brings out the Grey Wolves,” Little Man tells his wife, apropos of nothing, in a recently-posted gag. (Jokes aren’t always topical; you always keep some “in the freezer,” says George, for a slow news day.) “Odysseas faced the Cyclops, the Scylla and Charybdis, and the attorney-general,” Grandpa Man tells his grandson in another one, referencing the recent spat between Odysseas Michaelides and the AG. Sometimes, it’s true, George gets ambitious, like another recent cartoon blending Covid-19 with the Last Supper. “Amen, amen, I say to you that one among you has the coronavirus,” Jesus tells the disciples. “So I guess kissing is out, then, Master?” sighs Judas.
These more recent cartoons shouldn’t even exist, of course – because, after all, George is no longer being paid for drawing them. Alithia, his last port of call (he’s worked at almost every local paper, over the years), cut him loose about two years ago, shedding its cartoonist position as part of the general restructuring. Yet he still wakes up every morning, heads to a café, has his coffee, reads the day’s news – online, of course – and comes up with the day’s cartoon, which he draws and posts before going to his studio to paint. Is it just habit? A kind of therapy, insofar as having “a wall on which to write” allows him to blow off steam about current affairs? Or is it something more, part of the freedom he craves to live as he wants?
Art has always been important to George Mitides – as a kid, I assume, in a non-artistic family, as a civil servant who could always take solace in knowing he was more than a civil servant, as a quiet sort of person who could still be uncompromising when it came to lampooning the System. It’s not just the kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes, there’s another old-school metaphor that fits the political cartoonist: “He’s the king’s jester,” says George with a chuckle. “He’s the only one who can speak his mind freely without losing his head!” ‘Freely’ is the operative word here – just as painting portraits in his trademark style, in a tiny flat on the edge of town, is a kind of freedom, just as creativity is always a kind of freedom. “It’s a very personal matter,” he affirms. “I mean, you’re alone, doing what you feel… If you want to create, you have to be on your own.” I leave him to it, bidding adieu to the green-and-orange nymphs and heading back to the main road.