Spending my Thanksgiving in the faraway land of Montana, I am not truthfully exposed to art of any kind. I saw a painting or two made by a local artist nevertheless it did steer any particular emotions in me. However, today, scoping through one of art albums in a bookstore I came across a painting like nothing I have ever seen before. The painting, Dancing Girls, is made by an Iraqi painter- Hafiz Drubi. It is in a way a representation of Cubism, but in another its opposition.

As I came home I decided to research this artist, and what I found intriguing is that there is not that much information about him. From what I have learnt his style revolutionized Iraqi modernism and art. In his art, he combines abstraction and reality. He represents the changes that came with industrialization and the loss of tradition as well as culture by representing them from various angles.
It is said that his work is influenced by Cubism; I however do not see it. Cubism is known for having the object portrayed from different angles, broken up and than reassembled in order to represent the object in a greater context. The difference in angles is also supposed to take away from the depth and the sense of space. Conversely in Dancing Girls Drubi had portrayed ladies as a whole; there is no strange angles, no “cut up” objects. At the same time he had taken away from the depth of the paining; there is no particular plan, everybody is different size but they are all next to each other. There is no landscape, or surrounding that will highlight the difference in positioning of the dancers. Adding to that, the artist had interrupted the paining by placing many curvy lines on it. It is the only representation of the movement present in the paining that portrays dancers. We might almost say that it is the smudge left in the air after they had moved their arms through it.
Another interesting aspect of this paining is the fact that the artist did not include dancers’ facial expressions. The lady in the front has shaded sockets and a contour of her nose, while the second one has an empty face. We can conclude that Drubi left those blank to leave the room for our imagination. For one the dancers might be filled with joy, as they enjoy a moment of physical freedom, for others they might feel oppressed by the changes that came over their country. What ever it is, we are left with this area of speculation, guess, and imagination.