One
recognizes in Joseph Raffael the mute poet’ of Horace’s “Ut pictura
poesis,” and it is from the navigation point of the ancient and
Renaissance lore of the painter/poet as seer that one locates the
essence and alignment of Raffael’s mind and artistic intent.
Concepts
such as furor divinus, alta fantasia, intuition, visionary power, and
transcendence are a vital, driving force for Raffael.
“Artists . . .
have insights into the universal . . . They live in a mysterious place.
. .Their will has nothing to do with it, and that is why making art is
in a sense very religious”.
(Joseph Raffael, essay by Joyce Petschek,
catalogue for the one man exhibition, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York,
1990, p. 4.)
Artists often manifest their artistic drives in early childhood; in
fact, for the Renaissance author of the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio
Vasari,
this was a sure sign of true vocation and greatness.
By the
time Joseph Raffael was seven, drawing was his favorite pastime, and
nature his closest friend. From 1951 - 56, he attended Cooper Union
(BFA) and then Yale (MFA),
following a preferred route for talented
young artists. It was the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and Raffael
drew important lessons from that experience that continue to be
operative for him - “let go”, trust the brush and the paint, ritualize
the act of painting. Raffael's perhaps most respected teacher was Josef
Albers, with whom he studied at Yale. Raffael was impressed with
Albers, for one, because he insisted that his students not paint like
him and, in fact, that they not paint in already established styles
(for example, Abstract Expressionism). Albers also spoke not of hues
and tones, but of feeling, weather, times of day. This meshed with
Raffael’s own deep responses to, and regard for, the natural world.
After graduate school, Raffael joined the textile design studio of Jack
Prince (which was also an important starting point for Carolyn Brady,
Audrey Flack and other artists of that generation). Raffael recalls
that in the Prince studio he learned the discipline of draftsmanship
(providing the opportunity to exercise and strengthen his ability to
draw), to work within the limits of a project, and to reproduce colors
exactly. This experience, combined with a Fulbright to Italy, and the
encounter with the 14th and 15th century Italian masters, began to
shake loose the overarching appeal abstraction held for him. After some
early experiments with figural subject matter, his mature pictorial
vocabulary began to formulate.
For about a decade, he focused, among
other things, on solitary images in monumental scale of heads of
ancient statuary (Buddha), native American Indians, and animals, as a
way of understanding the ancient view of the infinite and of the making
of art as a product of a spiritual activity.
Trips to Asia, the
challenging experiences of life threatening illnesses, death of close
family members, the breakdown of a first marriage, the clatter of the
commercial aspects of art all, ultimately, have driven him to the
solace offered by the essence of Nature and to the paring down of his
own psyche to its essential self.
And it is through his psyche that Joseph Raffael, the artist,
moves from consciousness to a state of heightened subconscious
awareness as he seeks to identify the essence of an object or of a
state of being, and to make it tangible. He searches for imagery that
will touch not only his but the viewers own subconscious as well,
imagery that will stir the soul.
He seeks through his art to arouse
recognition of the archetypal, of the divine, in the accidentals of the
natural world.
His imagery, medium and technique work in concert and
are tuned in this resolve - birds, flowers, landscape, color, light,
and brushwork become the symbols of love, beauty, innocence, divine
fragrance, peace, order, mystery, and the ephemeral.
Raffael has stated
it most clearly. “Painting is the subject of my work, and nature the
inspiration.” ("Interview with Joseph Raffael," Joseph Raffael: A Dream
Remembered, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, catalogue for the exhibition, 1986,
p. 6.)
Raffael’s imagery was more obviously stated in his early work, his
symbolism more direct: for example, bird = spirit; a Japanese shrine in
a winter landscape = serenity.
These more literal elements have given
way in the later work to the physical dynamics of imaging (light,
color, energy, quality of rendering), and to a new maturity of vision
that underpins the image. In a number of earlier paintings, highly
defined borders of abstract form and visionary color framed the central
image (perhaps suggested, in part, by the work of his teacher Josef
Albers), as if the picture were the meeting point of two different
realities.
In such paintings as After the Rain, An Iris with Border
(Seavest Collection), for example, these borders seem to have
metamorphosed into the ephemeral backgrounds of his floral
and still
life pictures, creating a more homogeneous tension between planes in
and out of focus.
These backgrounds with a quality of light diffused as
if through stained glass, identify a realm somewhere between the
terrestrial and the celestial, between the tangible and the ideal. In
these stunning images beauty and opulence unabashedly confront the
viewer, and scale overwhelms. Composition, line, color, and brushwork
have an emotional/spiritual pitch.
The image – whether of a flower
resplendent in its full maturity, or of Lannis whose physicality is
dissolved in the floral array of a favored dress,
or of koi stirring
the surface of a pond (Before Solstice,Seavest Collection) -
intoxicates.
Raffael’s work is not easily categorized, though associations with the
Post Impressionists, Symbolists, Naturalists, Expressionists and even
Photorealists have been offered.
To the point here, is the fact that
Raffael does use photographs as an aid in the process of creating an
image. But in distinction to other of his Realist colleagues who also
employ photographs in their creative process, Raphael uses them as a
vehicle of meditation, not so much as Photorealism than as a sort of
Photo-transcendentalism.
In fact, for a very long time Raffael painted
exclusively in the dark, with only a slide projected onto a small
screen located next to the surface on which he was about to paint.
The
solitary image lit brightly from behind has allowed him to extract the
electric, prismatic effect of blues and reds, and to understand the
advantage of enhanced luminosity.
It has contributed to the development
of his special palette and versatile, expressive brushwork, which are
ultimately in service to the description of the extraordinary colors, emanations and essence of Nature herself.
Raffael draws inspiration from another modern art form as well - cinema.
He is a great fan of the big screen, and seeks in the exploded, super
scale and resonance of his own paintings to impart something of the
impact and story line of movies in a single startling image.
As evidenced by the paintings by Raffael that illustrate this essay,
the breakdown of the surfaces of objects seen at close range into a
network of variously pitched and colored marks has the optical effect
of scintillating energy.
This quality of imaging draws us from normal
vision into our mind's eye, and seeks to convey non-verbal, mystical
experiences with Nature.
Raffael works comfortably in acrylic, but
tends to prefer watercolor.
Watercolor offers him a more direct echo of
the unrepeatable and unpredictable events in nature, for example, the
split second that light or rain momentarily transform a leaf or petal,
or that just beneath the water’s surface koi,never touching, glide
effortlessly past each other like molten gold.
While Raffael’s pictorial surface can at times be Impressionistic, at
times Expressionistic, his artistic intent places him in the tradition
- from antiquity to the Symbolists, to those similarly inspired 20th
century masters - of artist as seer.
As such, his art might be viewed
as transcending not only the material sphere but the temporal one as
well,
offering a glimpse of the visionary in the often vacuous culture
of the late 20th century
much as Blake, Redon or Kandinsky had sought
to in their own troubled worlds.
©by
Virginia Anne Bonito, "Get Real: Contemporary American
Realism from the Seavest Collection" Raffael essay, DUMA, 1998, pp. 104
– 108; revised for the Seavest Collection Webpage and in-house
Catalogue, May 2, 2000.
This essay is reprinted with permission of the
author.