You might recognize his work, but not him

Living quietly right in your own neighborhood is Michael Mendel.

If the name’s not familiar, that’s OK. But he worked for many years as an album design artist before finding a second calling as an antiques dealer and later specializing in watercolor art. Today, he has retired to the Bronx, where he continues to stretch his creativity with his paintings.

His home is decorated in antiques and art. The walls are covered by his paintings — many with the same subject: A smiling woman with chestnut hair.

And yes, she’s real. It’s not only Mendel’s  art representative, but also his love and muse, Barbara Dellafemina. Mendel was married twice before, raising two sons. But now his life is all about Dellafemina.

Mendel was born in Berlin in 1934, just before his family was forced to flee the Nazis in the lead-up to World War II.

He was given a little doll as a young boy, which he always carried around and called Zepel. When his family fled Germany in the middle of the night, they were forced to leave behind most all of their possessions — including Zepel.

Years later, after being an artist for quite some time, he felt as though his artwork wasn’t receiving the recognition he wanted. He solved it by replacing his own name when he signed his artwork with that of Zepel in honor of his little doll he left behind so many years before.

Mendel studied art while attending City College, and then headed off to the U.S. Army, where he taught military tactics at Fort Benning in Georgia.

One of his first jobs returning home was at an ad agency.

“We didn’t have computers back then,” he said. “It’s not like now.”

That meant all of Mendel’s work was done freehand first.

But for Mendel, he truly didn’t embrace art until much later — like in  2009. He was in the middle of a divorce, and found himself picking up his paintbrush to find solace.

“I’m self-taught in watercolors, and in the learning process, I have made a lot of mistakes,” he said.

Still, Mendel mostly sticks to his watercolors, although in the past he has experimented with sculpture, photography, and mixed media.

And he would find himself making his own mark on history.

While at the agency, a friend of his told him about a job opening at Columbia Records. He was quickly hired, and he immediately began working designing album covers for Latin American performers — a genre of music he was unfamiliar with.

Designing an album cover typically involved the artist or their representative, and “they would supply me with a photograph or a painting, and I would use that to make the cover.

“I was given the title of the album and the songs that were going to be in it, and I had to set typeset and that became the cover. That was easy.”

Back then — especially in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s,  albums were vinyl LPs.

“You would have to sift through them to see which one you wanted, which meant that when you design an album, the title always had to be in the top third of the album,” Mendel said. “You might have done a design and thought, ‘Oh, it would be good to put the lettering down below,’ but they would never let that go because nobody would see it.”

Mendel completed more than a thousand albums including album covers over 35 years for the likes of Tony Bennett, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Stylistics, and the soundtrack for “The Godfather.”

“Every job was a test,” he said. “You were only as good as your last job, and you had to perform.”

The competition was tough, and people got fired all the time. So, when he got fired roughly four years into the job, he wasn’t surprised. Instead, he went into business for himself, freelancing album cover designs.

He even went as far as opening his own graphic design studio in 1979.

At the height of his career, Mendel was making the big bucks. He boasted about purchasing a $70,000 Porsche and taking trips to Europe and South America.

After retiring, he decided to become an antiques dealer. He specialized in Victorian era glass that was meant to be both vase and bowl.

However, his dealings in the antique world came to a sudden halt when, one day while driving to a show, he stopped for a bite to eat and came out to find his car and all of its contents missing.

None of it was ever recovered.

“It was brutal,” Mendel said.

To this day, Mendel keeps some of the same art practices he started with all those years ago. When an idea comes to him, he will often start by sketching it out, just lines on a paper that only an artist could understand.

He then brings the painting to life, finding inspiration in the everyday, photographing it before studying those to create his artwork.

Mendel often retreats to his secondary home in the Catskills. His parents bought the 50 acre of land years ago, which he inherited.  After he was robbed, he was forced to sell most of the surrounding acres, but held onto the house and just a couple acres.

Now, the Catskills inspire his work, painting the scenery from his windows, or finding inspiration in his neighbor’s yards.

In one of his pieces, “The Outhouse Five,” depicts a band playing in a junkyard. The inspiration came from a Catskill neighbor’s yard that held a small junkpile. He then asked his neighbor and Barbara to pose among the trash.

He took individual photos. Then, back at his studio, he cut out each figure and maneuvered the pieces until he could sketch out the vision he had for the piece in his head.

Once he finalized the idea, he got to work, later winning a $2,000 reward.

The piece took more than two months, compared to the time he spends on his paintings, which is typically done in less than a week.

One of his series of paintings is unlike the others. It is black and white, and features an almost pointillism like artwork. These are done in remembrance of those who died in the Holocaust. The paintings capture the somber atmosphere of their contents, with small, silver barbed wires overlaid on top of the figurines.

“I try to paint every day,” Mendel said.

For him, being retired has not stopped his creative flow. He is continuously coming up with ideas, and even now is looking for inspiration for his next piece.