Articles about art

August 28, 2026 Shtisel: An Artist Between Calling, Family and Faith Akiva Shtisel’s story is more than a subplot about painting. It is one of television’s most perceptive explorations of vocation, family responsibility and an artist’s right to see another person in his own way. This article discusses the character’s general development but avoids revealing major plot turns. The Israeli series Shtisel is often recommended as a rare window onto the everyday life of an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. Its world is filled with matchmaking, marriage, domestic disagreements, financial worries, religious study and long conversations around the family table. Yet the series is also about something else: the making of an artist. Akiva Shtisel’s story unfolds almost like a novel of artistic vocation. Instead of the familiar escape of a young genius from a restrictive province, however, we watch a man try to become an artist without ceasing to be a son, husband, father and member of his community. That is what makes Shtisel particularly rewarding for viewers who care about art. The series does not spend much time asking whether Akiva has talent; his gift is apparent. The harder question is where painting can fit in a life already shaped by strong obligations to family, faith and tradition. Akiva is not a conventional rebel At the beginning of the story, Akiva is a young unmarried man living with his widowed father, Shulem. He is gentle, distracted and often unable to state his wishes directly. A more conventional drama might quickly turn him into a romantic rebel: the artist against a conservative environment, freedom against prohibition. Creators Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky choose a subtler path. Akiva does not want to destroy the world in which he grew up. He loves his father and relatives, values the rhythms of his community and does not regard his religious life as a mistake. His challenge is not to select one of two mutually exclusive identities. He is trying to preserve both. Every creative step therefore becomes not a theatrical gesture of liberation but a difficult act of negotiation: can he take painting seriously without withdrawing from the people to whom his daily life belongs? Not a simple ban on images, but a dispute about boundaries It would be misleading to reduce the series’ conflict to the claim that Judaism simply prohibits visual art. The history of Jewish art is far more complex, and attitudes toward figurative representation have varied across periods, places and religious traditions. In Shtisel, the tension concerns social boundaries above all: what counts as a respectable occupation, how much time a person may devote to an individual calling, whether an intimate image should be exposed to public view, and whether an artistic career can sustain a family. To Shulem, his son’s painting is both a gift and a danger. He recognizes Akiva’s ability but fears the instability of an artist’s life. Money is only part of the anxiety. A painting carries private experience into public space, while an artist learns to look at a familiar person in ways that ordinary social relations do not always permit. Shulem tries to protect his son and the family order using the means he knows: advice, pressure, irony and, at times, manipulation. This keeps him from becoming a flat villain. His resistance grows out of love, fear and an inability to imagine another safe life for Akiva. Portraiture as intimacy Akiva is first and foremost a portrait painter, and that matters. He is not interested in issuing abstract manifestos or proving his modernity through provocation. His art begins with sustained attention to a particular human being. To sit for him is to entrust the artist not only with a face but with part of an inner life. Such a gaze can be tender, but it is never neutral. A portrait changes the relationship between artist and sitter: it asks one person to look for longer, notice vulnerability and preserve someone who may no longer be present. As the series develops, paintings become vessels of memory, desire and grief. They do not merely illustrate what the characters have already said; they communicate what Akiva cannot say aloud. Here Shtisel avoids another familiar cliché. Art is not presented as an unconditionally healing power. A painting can preserve closeness, but it can also prevent a person from releasing the past. The artist’s ability to hold an image becomes a gift and an ordeal at once. Canvas remembers with unsettling persistence, and memory can sometimes keep time from moving forward. Real paintings for a fictional artist The credibility of Akiva’s development owes much to the real artists who made the works seen on screen. Israeli illustrator and draughtsman Menahem Halberstadt created drawings for the first season. As the character moved toward oil painting, Alex Tubis became the principal artist behind many of the later works. Tubis’s official website includes a gallery devoted to Shtisel. The choice of Tubis works on more than a technical level. His painting combines the legacy of classical portraiture with a contemporary emotional register. Material, worked surfaces coexist with quietness, awkwardness and a feeling of arrested time. The pictures seem capable of growing out of Akiva’s character rather than being borrowed from an unrelated artistic biography. In an interview with The Forward, Tubis explained that the production did not ask him to imitate a fashionable painter: the team wanted his own work. Michael Aloni, who plays Akiva, learned the fundamentals of painting, while close views of the hand at work sometimes involved the artist himself. The detail matters. What viewers believe is not merely the prop on an easel but embodied labor — the grip of a brush, the painter’s stance before the canvas and the gradual accumulation of an image. The studio as another form of life The Shtisel home is organized around recurring rituals: meals, conversations, telephone calls, discussions of marriage and responsibility. The studio obeys a different rhythm. It permits silence, looking and the suspension of immediate answers. It is not merely a workplace but a space in which Akiva briefly stops being the object of other people’s expectations. Yet the series never turns the studio into a romantic refuge beyond society. Clients, gallery owners, sitters and relatives enter it. Paintings must be shown, judged, sold and explained. Once art becomes a profession, freedom acquires new dependencies. The market brings its own definition of success, and recognition can create as much anxiety as earlier disapproval. The official description of the third season on yes Studios presents Akiva as both a father and a thriving artist. Professional recognition, however, does not complete his story. Success cannot abolish family responsibility, memory or doubt. It makes him answer not only for his right to paint but also for what his paintings do to other people. Jerusalem without the postcard The artistic theme is reinforced by the visual language of the whole series. Jerusalem is rarely presented as a sequence of famous monuments. Instead, the camera attends to apartments, staircases, courtyards, the narrow streets of Geula, classrooms and modest cafés. It values worn surfaces, muted light, brown and grey-green tones. The city is not a backdrop for a grand historical statement; it is an environment in which the habits of generations appear to have entered the walls. Akiva looks in much the same way. He discovers significance not in the exceptional but in a familiar face, an incidental pose or a domestic silence. His painting therefore continues the work of the camera. Both artist and series notice a person within a social role. Father, bride, widow, child or teacher ceases to be only a function within the family order and becomes an individual with a singular interior life. Why Akiva’s story matters to artists Shtisel understands what biographies of great masters often omit. An artist does not exist only in front of a canvas. He needs time, space and money; he must withstand the incomprehension of loved ones, learn to speak with a professional art world, and decide how much of private life may be turned into an image. Creative freedom is assembled out of many practical negotiations. The series offers no universal solution. To submit entirely to family expectations would mean betraying an essential part of the self. But to declare art the supreme value and ignore its consequences for other people is not enough either. Akiva’s maturity is measured less by the loudness of his rebellion than by his ability to accept responsibility for his way of seeing. This is what makes Shtisel unusual among screen stories about artists. It is neither an escape narrative from tradition into modernity nor a legend about a genius to whom everything is permitted. Akiva searches for a way to remain inside his world while enlarging it — to show that an artist’s attention can also be a form of love, remembrance and belonging. Shtisel was created by Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky. The series is in Hebrew and Yiddish. The official yes Studios page lists three seasons of 12, 12 and 9 episodes. Michael Aloni plays Akiva and Dovale Glickman plays Shulem. Sources Official series page at yes Studios Shtisel gallery on Alex Tubis’s official website Alex Tubis: biography and exhibitions The Forward interview with Alex Tubis