Author Archives: JR

Blossom Plumb writes about Joseph’s painting in progress

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“Joseph,

I look at your painting and wonder–what title? Then see
It is burning up titles as they arrive.
They dissolve in that molten line.
Is there a name that can withstand the intensity of that light?

Was it the change in the molecular structure of the new paper that flashed into your eye and hand?
Was it the idea altering the stuff of the paper that began
the never-before translation into paint-taking the see-er
by his hand and directing his gaze through the the rose palace to the until now unseen?
I lack any technical vocabulary- Only know I am looking within
the universe that is before us and that over millennia is seen by but a few light/struck artists.
You trekked the mountain; the gate opened; you saw. You pass it on.”

Joseph answers:

“I’ve not had a title come to me yet.
Perhaps it could be called INTERIOR LIGHT.
I so appreciate your words which are also filled with light.
You know the letter of Rilke’s to the Young Poet when he says
“Nothing can approach the poem except a heart filled with love”
That is a VERY rough remembrance of how RMR said it,
but that’s what I thought in the woods this AM,
‘Blossom’s heart is filled with love and that’s why she could see and describe the ptg so well’.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. It is the molecular structure of the new paper that flashed its way into the ptg. Absolutely.
I believe it was the experience of thinking it was all over for me as an artist because the paper had changed which helped another painter inside me take the brush in hand..
In fact it is the paper which has the ptg perhaps already in it.
You know the story of the child looking at the stone sculpture of the bird, and asks
“How did the artist know there was a bird inside the stone?”
It could be that that’s what’s happening here in the studio.
Mysteries to be revealed lie before me as ptgs.”

Painting in Progress

Painting is primarily color

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Color
“The older I get, the more I feel that color is what painting is.
Painting is primarily color.
Theoretically I learned that at the beginning, perhaps it was Albers from whom I first heard it, but here I am now,
in these twilight skies, knowing that, for me, painting is color.
And because my works are primarily about the act of painting while using nature’s realm as point of departure, (or is it point of arrival?)—–
and that I feel nature in all its mystery and spiritual breath can best be expressed by color’s energetic spectrum.
Color is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color.
With all its variety and liveliness, color acts in the work of art as blood does as it circulates through our bodies.
Color is what keeps the painting alive and moving.

When I paint, it is basically the putting of one color next to another —–
that’s really what I do. Colors building slowly and inevitably, constructing and creating
what is to be born in the painting-to-be.
One color appears, and then another one goes next to it,
then another lies itself over a color, and then a spot here, a speck there,
and then an air of a color there, then a glob of color there.
A kind of democratic state is born as all these individual color beings join together,
living,working and playing together in one space.

I believe that the more color-surprises reveal themselves,
the more the painting will be rich, more like life, in all its revelations of the unexpected,
the never known before, the inevitable being made manifest
Let the tapestry be as full as possible.
Let the colors sing and zing.
Let colors speak their language of life.

Painting is primarily color.”

Joseph Raffael
2008