Joseph raffael

MOVING TOWARD THE LIGHT JOSEPH RAFFAEL

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PAINTING IS THE SUBJECT OF THE PAINTING MOVING TOWARD THE LIGHT

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MY LIFE, A DESTINY WHICH I UNKNOWINGLY FOLLOWED, SLOWLY AND SURELY

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would be like trying to a make a darting fish in a pond swim a long straight line.

A conventional summary might read as follows: Interested in drawing from an early age, Raffael attended art school at the Brooklyn Museum, graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in New York. He was awarded a Summer Fellowship at the Yale-Norfolk School in 1954, and went on to attend Yale University School of Fine Arts on a scholarship, where he studied with Josef Albers. In 1958, he won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Florence and Rome.

Joseph Raffael has lived successively in New York—Brooklyn, and the West Village, Long Island—in Florence and Rome, Italy, in Bennington Vermont, in Marin County, California. He has taught at several universities from 1966 to 1974, including the University of California, at both the Davis and the Berkeley campuses, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and California State University at Sacramento. Since 1986, he and his wife Lannis have been living in Antibes, France.

A more finely tuned focus on Raffael’s life would begin in the present, inside the studio at ‘Site Charmant.’

The artist’s workspace is a simple airy white room with a ceiling fan and tall arched windows with sliding doors that lead to a small terrace facing the sea. The first impression is an exuberant mix of order and chaos.

Raffael is sitting on a high stool in front of his long drafting table. His most recent and ambitious work-in-progress (“my Beethoven’s Ninth!”) is an intricate giant watercolor of a pink flowering Rhaphiolepsis tree that caught the artist’s attention one Sunday morning during his perusal of the garden, camera in hand.

The painting, titled Life Streaming will be 55 inches wide and 93 inches long; “The biggest watercolor I’ve ever done,” he says. It has taken him six days to draw.

For the time being, the paper is rolled up in a huge scroll on the drafting table.

For Raffael, there is no preconceived order as to which spot of the painting he will choose to work on any given day, nor, for that matter, which colors or brushes he may use.

This long-established approach goes along with trusting his intuition. “I’m in the moment and I’m not looking at the whole painting,” Raffael says. “Many painters see what’s in front of them but with the scroll, I have no idea what was painted beforehand.”

“I find a place in it that interests me—it might be a color, an expanse or a very complex area that may end up having five or six hundred brush strokes. It’s not like writing a novel where you write a linear sequence. My materials are so much a part of me—intuitively, I go to the blue or green I need in that moment.”

He pauses, gazing at the array of round glass dishes of watercolors that he has mixed for his liquid palette.

He picks up one of the watercolor wax crayons, piled haphazardly on a small table. “These mix with water, they’re lighter and wetter.” On another table are the pure watercolor sticks, an assortment of brushes and a stack of approximately 15 palettes with shade by shade nuances of reds, yellows, blues, greens, pinks oranges and violets.

“The paper is impossible,” the artist says. “It won’t do what I want it to, so it does what it does. And then I put the colors on it, and they’re wet, so when it

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painting can enter stage left, touching into a tiny something of nature’s mysterious essence and being, and that’s when the brush and the hand become the holy wands letting something of the thrilling boundlessness of the beyond, to express through us, if and when grace touches us.

One of the things I love most about being an artist, and expressing myself through painting, is the utter secrecy and isolation of it.

I am not painting the leaf, but rather, the act of painting can enter into a mode of jumping off a kind of spirit diving board. In that space between the leap and the touching of the water (touching the page with the brush), I enter into another realm, where the leaf is no longer ‘leaf.’ I am no longer ‘painter,’ and the two do a spirit dance. I gladly lose whatever ideas I have identified with, and then the result can surprise and delight me. It’s because the act of color and water joining together on a page can begin to enter the portal of nature’s enigmatic energy, its spiritual breadth and breath. The subject becomes spirit, and it is at oneness with all nature.

BDS: In Flower Dream (2013), the background has an oneiric quality, a mysterious and emphatic foil contrasting with the more representational aspects of the hydrangea and the leaves. It represents the consummate marriage between abstraction and realism.

Describe your dialogue with your painting.

JR: My dialogue all this time, and now more consciously than ever, is between the seen and the unseen. My painting is and has been a kind of conversation with mystery.

I am humble standing before it. The subjects of the leaf or the fish or the flower or the water are bridges to the other side of the river.

ALL SEASONS CALL TO ME TO BE PAINTED.

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BDS: Cogently and beautifully expressed, Joseph. Because each of your paintings has a singular life and breath of its own and because of the spiritual energy they project, they suggest the numinous. So much of the emotional and spiritual essence of the paintings comes from your color choices. Your color is Baroque in its resplendence, opulence and sumptuousness.

This statement about color gives us an opportunity to talk about Josef Albers, your professor at Yale.

JR: The basic influence of Josef Albers remains in me always. I was a shy person in my early twenties. Albers was a fleeting distant Germanic figure we students held in awe. One of my most important and my favorite experiences with him was in his color class, which was in a large room with many lines of tall tables where students worked. I always sat in the back of the room, a habit I began in kindergarten.

Outside the classroom we were encouraged to do collages. Then each week we would go to class, put our collages on the table in front of us. Albers’ assistants would walk by collecting a few, which Albers would critique for the class.

One day he held up mine, and said “You can know a lot about the person who made this. To prove my point, would the person who made this, wave HER hand?”

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MY PAINTING IS AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN A CONVERSATION WITH MYSTERY

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REMEMBERING ORIGINAL MIND MOVING TOWARD THE LIGHT

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THE PROCESS IS AN ABSTRACT ONE BECAUSE I AM ALWAYS PAINTING DETAILS OF DETAILS OF DETAILS MOVING TOWARD THE LIGHT

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34. (p.128) Mysteries. 2005. Watercolor on paper, 153 x 113 cm, (60 ¼ x 44 ½ inches)

35. (p.139) Pond for F. Garcia Lorca. 2005. Watercolor on paper, 193 x 193 cm (76 x 76 inches)

36. (p.62, detail) Homage to Carolyn Brady, 1937-2005. 2005. Watercolor on paper, 105.4 x 113 cm (41 ½ x 44 ½ inches)

Private Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection

37. (p.22, detail; p.23) Return of Spring. 2005. Watercolor on paper, 193.7 x 167 cm (76 ¼ x 65 ¾ inches)

38. (pp.140-141) Spirit. 2006. Watercolor on paper, 152.4 x 215.9 cm (60 x 85 inches)

39. (pp.86-87) Stegner. 2006. Watercolor on paper, 132.1 x 198.1 cm (52 x 78 inches)

Collection of Margaret Fulton Mueller, Cleveland, Ohio

Private Collection

Private Collection

40. (p.118; p.119, detail) Emergence. 2006. Watercolor on paper, 149.9 x 100.3 cm (59 x 39 ½ inches)

41. (p.48) Renascence 2007. 2007. Watercolor on paper, 160 x 113 cm (63 x 44 ½ inches)

42. (p.66; p.85, detail) Spirit Like the Wind II. 2007. Watercolor on paper, 110.5 x 168.9 cm (43 ½ x 66 ½ inches)

Private Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection

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43. (p.124) Muriel’s Vase: Summer. 2007. Watercolor on paper, 160 x 111.8 cm (63 x 44 inches)

44. (pp.2-3, detail) Anniversary. 2007. Watercolor on paper, 144.8 x 215.9 cm (57 x 85 inches)

45. (p.125, detail) Muriel’s Vase: Autumn. 2008. Watercolor on paper, 153.7 x 226.1 cm (60 ½ x 89 inches)

Private Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection

46. (pp.72-73) Blossoms and Sky. 2008. Watercolor on paper, 137.8 x 226.7 cm (54 ¼ x 89 ¼ inches)

47. (p.84, detail) Summer’s Dream of Spring. 2008. Watercolor on paper, 153.7 x 226.1 cm (60 ½ x 89 inches)

48. (p.83, detail) Studio Bouquet. 2008. Watercolor on paper, 137.2 x 213.4 cm (54 x 84 inches)

Private Collection

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Orb

Private Collection

49. (pp.120-121) Inauguration. 2009. Watercolor on paper, 152.4 x 221 cm (60 x 87 inches)

50. (pp.122-123) In Appreciation. 2009. Watercolor on paper. 138.4 x 226.4 cm (54 ½ x 89 ⅛ inches)

51. (pp.134-135) Guido’s Gift. 2009. Watercolor on paper, 160 x 226.1 cm (63 x 89 inches)

Courtesy of Nancy Hoffman Gallery, NY

Courtesy of Nancy Hoffman Gallery, NY

Private Collection

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