"My soul is from elsewhere, I’m
sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
—Rumi, “Who Says Words With My Mouth?”
Trans: Coleman Barks
There is something becomes of master artists as they progress.
Throughout the history of the arts, throughout all the major art forms,
we find artists who enter a stage of their work in which a change comes
over the art they have devoted decades to making their own. Something
new arises—often something utterly unpredictable, as often a further
progression of the course they have been taking all along—but it is
always a change that seems astonishing. And it is always a change that
seems the fulfillment of a promise, as if after the long years of
perfecting a style, a more perfect approach to art makes itself evident.
We see it rarely and only in the masters of the mode. We have found such
changes of manner, such renewals of perfection, in the last sculpture of
Michelangelo, in which he moved to incomplete figures embodying gestures
of articulated ardency; in the poet W. B. Yeats, who evolved to a hard,
seemingly granite emotionality bereft of all easy sentimentality; in
Shakespeare, who found in “The Tempest” a profound ease that follows the
composition of the most harrowing tragedies in our literature. We have
seen such transformation in Mozart’s late, dark symphonies, in Titian’s
last forms dissolving in the maelstrom of his brushstrokes, and in T. S.
Eliot’s final turning toward mysticism. There seems to come to some
artists an ultimate revelation, a distillation of the artistic vision, a
rinsing of the eye of the creator, as if finally the long years of
mastery turned out to be an apprenticeship and the truth of the art
comes to bloom like a late-summer flower. The blossoming of that rose
brings to us a realization that is indispensable: the art that had
required so many years to reach its zenith becomes purified, relieved of
all extrinsic matters, delivered of all infiltrates, of all peripheral
concerns and superfluous habits of imagination and vision, and there is
disclosed to us a purged, cleansed, unencumbered art, an art that seems
as if the first art—there is revealed to us what art truly is.
Such moments in the chronology of a profound creativity force a
question: “What art does one create when one has finally made one’s way
home?” The evidence of these works makes clear that there are works of
art and a sense of art that can come in the second half of an artistic
career and that can be achieved by no other means. These are the works
of maturity, the works of hard-won ability. In a time of general,
culture-wide, even world-wide fascination with youth, there is a lesson
here that we should acknowledge: we should turn the greater part of our
attention from innovation to experience, for there is a vision that
arrives in each field of creative endeavor only, and only occasionally,
to the master artists of the mode.
Joseph Raffael is a master of such caliber—for more years now than
anyone has an excuse to fail to recognize, he has been the most
accomplished watercolorist in the contemporary art world—and the works
in his current exhibition constitute a modern instance of this ultimate
insight, of the renewal of the delving power of creation, of something
thought perfect perfecting itself. His subject matter remains what it
has been for many years—garden scenes and forest settings, flowers
flourishing in the wild and settled in vases, ponds with fish drifting
just below the surface, the play and lacing movements of water, birds
blending in among the leaves. Yet there is something tangibly different,
something fresh and distinct. These current works appear denser, more
precise, more fully conceived, realized, and concrete. They seem cleaner
and more aware, more themselves, as if both more spontaneous and more
deliberate, more dream-like and more exquisitely observed, more creative
and more obedient to nature. Recognizably what Raffael’s art has always
been, they seem suddenly new.
It is as if Raffael’s art has achieved a refinement and clarification, a
maturation, and what we thought we knew, surprisingly, we can now come
to know. And yet, we should not be surprised, because there is an aspect
of inevitability to this latest work, as there always is with the
fulfillment phase of a master—even when the ultimate distillation of the
work takes a seemingly unpredictable turn, in retrospect the line of
development is clear. This is the work towards which Raffael’s career
has been heading, and it is a culmination and a ratification of his
place in contemporary art history. From the time Raffael began with his
white-ground paintings of the mid-1960s—fragmentary images drawn from
advertising and popular culture, painted against a pure white
background—he has been categorized as a realist. Yet, by the mid-1970s,
when Raffael turned to painting directly from nature, it became evident
that he stood apart from the various modalities of realism that have
dominated the last several decades. He is not and has not been a
Photorealist, or a Neo-Expressionist, or, of course, a Pop artist.
Unlike the other realist painters of our time, Raffael does not distort
reality for emotional expressiveness or render photographically precise
images with a stunning but arid and static precision of observation.
What Raffael has retained and nurtured in his work, exclusively among
the major realist painters of our time, is the aesthetic emotion—the
love of paint as a method of vision, the palpably created vision that
seeks the unfiltered truth of observation. In short, Raffael, alone
among his peers, has retained the love of and devotion to beauty, or, to
say the same thing in other words, his art has never lost its connection
to life, to the vivacity of the image, to the sheer zest and urgency of
animated nature, and of painting, of art, itself.
His is the dedication and the mark of an isolated soul—an individual’s
devotion, a sole visionary’s occupation. And that is part of its
inevitability. Raffael has always been one alone, an artist who has
relied on and trusted his own inner impulses rather than followed the
recipes for success in the art industry. He has sought to be an
authentic artist, not an art star. In the mid-1980s, he departed the New
York art world and moved to France, where he could pursue his art
without distraction. There, he has stripped the inessentials from his
life—he lives to paint and does nothing professionally but paint. He
practices a commitment rather than a career, and so the circle of
inevitability closes itself, and it makes full sense that his art would
be among the rare few to reach the final stage of completion, the
ultimate development of a full maturation.
What we discover in the paintings in the current exhibition is the thing
itself—not just examples of Raffael’s art but his art per se, his art in
its ideal form, his vision rendered and sublimated to the point that it
instructs us in the very nature of art. Every work proves by its own
example what art can do, what art is for. And more, these paintings
reveal the intrinsic nature of the art that Raffael has made his own—the
art of beauty. As one walks among these creations, one can virtually
feel the anatomy of their intangible sensibility. One can begin to
catalogue the qualities and the effects of pure beauty, and start to
comprehend the purpose to which they aspire.
The translucency of the visual textures: Raffael’s paintings bring a
gentle, almost immaterial touch to the eye, a contact as light as a
breath, a visual impression that caresses with a delicacy beyond
physical sensation. His images seem to hang before the paper, almost in
layers, like leaves of some transcendental gelatin preparing to lift,
slowing disclosing the light from behind. In paintings such as Re-Entry,
2003,
the watercolor is like a scrim, like stained glass somehow
rendered on the opacity of the paper, dappling the surface with
Raffael’s nearly abstract lozenges of color, which appear to be the
prismatic facets of a jewel, a gem-like constellation of the spectrum of
the imagination. There is something substantial and yet insubstantial
about the vision. As you look, you feel as if you can fall into the
image—gently, into a pillowed depth, as one might fall in love.
The suffusion of the color: Despite the gentle, almost ephemeral quality
of the colors, they become an embracing environment of awareness, a
manner of dreaming itself—a form of understanding and of inhabiting what
one understands. As one gazes, one lives the colors, as if each were a
distinct mood, a quality of reception into the mind. For the painting
Pond for F. Garcia Lorca, 2005
POND FOR F. GARCIA LORCA, 2005
watercolor on paper, 76 x 76 1/2 inches
Raffael concerned himself with a particular poem by Lorca: “Romance
Sonambulo.” It begins with these lines: “Green, how I want you green. /
Green wind. Green branches.” The painting is precisely that gesture of
mind. It is nature exactly observed, yet the moment has been selected
for its imaginative import. We see in the work a world of green—the
green of the inner feelings, the green of projecting thoughts, the mood
of the nature of green, found at the edge of a pond of rippling water,
found and aestheticized into art.
The bristling urge of the gesture: Focus on the elements of the images,
the objects of nature depicted in the paint, and one will find there is
a slight shimmer to the edges of things, a rippling energy that crosses
the surface of the paintings, merging and re-merging in a confluence of
flows, like the surfaces of the ponds in
Pond for F. Garcia Lorca; Inman’s Sacred Pond, 2004;and Life
Streams, 2004.
INMAN'S SACRED POND, 2004
watercolor on paper, 37 x 51 1/2 inches
LIFE STREAMS, 2004
watercolor on paper, 39 1/4 x 56 inches
There is a wavering, a trembling of soft pressures that moves
along a continuous medium, like a skin so sensitive that the slightest
touch of the eye sends soft shivers running through it. All that we see
are living objects, and the surfaces of the works are as if a skin of
life itself, holding a tension that is gentle and expectant, like a held
breath, like an urge to joy, an elation that almost wants to burst
forth—a joyfulness of pure beauty. Every image is an ineluctable
urge—like a hand held forth that one could not have withheld.
The condensation of the image: The image collects together, pulls itself
into its form by a quality like an internal gravity, even as the specks
of dappled color drift like specular motes. There has always been a
formidable and enriching tension in Raffael’s paintings between the
clarity of depicted nature and the visible assembly of patches of hue,
as if realism and abstraction could readily co-exist. But here, in
paintings such as
Homage to Carolyn Brady, 2005 (painted in honor of another
wonderful painter, who died this year), Peony, 2004, and Roses for
Vera, 2004,
HOMAGE TO CAROLYN BRADY - 1939-2005, 2005
watercolor on paper, 41 1/2 x 44 1/2 inches
PEONY, 2004
watercolor on paper, 36 1/2 x 26 inches
ROSES FOR VERA, 2004
watercolor on paper, 67 x 45 inches
both qualities have been intensified, and the rendered image takes
on an appearance of solidity beyond what the artist has given us before.
Each of these flower images has the felt density of a sculpture; each is
so concretely evident that it might have been cut from stone. In every
case, in all the new works, the image is like a precipitate, like a
condensation, congealing like droplets of water collecting on leaves, on
the scales of a fish surfacing, beading like pools of watercolor airing
themselves to dry into art, like thought pulling together into moments
of inspiration, like moments of inspiration densifying into fleeting
insights, eternally remembered and impossible to explain.
The labyrinth of the image: Perhaps so clear in no work as in Homage to
Carolyn Brady,
the image that seems to have formulated itself as much as it has been
formulated by Raffael condenses into something utterly simple and
utterly complex. It seems something of a maze, something of a centered
pattern that swirls outward, that opens and unfolds, revealing a hard
and delicate exactitude of imagined sight so clear, of such glistening
and intense perception, that it mystifies. Which is to say that each
painting is something of a mandala, something of a center of aesthetic
contemplation, drawing the viewer’s eye into it even as it unfurls to
disclose itself. And this is true regardless of the depicted image—it is
as true of the spray of uncountable blossoms in
Eternal Return: Spring, 2004,
ETERNAL RETURN: Spring 2004
watercolor on paper, 61 1/2 x 45 inches
as it is of the single flower of Homage to Carolyn Brady. For there is
no one center to any of the Raffael’s works, and not merely because
every moment of each of them is rendered with equal precision, with
equal attention beckoned of the eye. Rather, it is due the integration
of the image—as with any work of art of the highest order, every aspect
necessitates every other, every point on the surface is the point the
entire work composes itself around, every moment in the work is the
center. And this quality points toward the final attribute.
The inimitable image: There is a summary quality of impeccability to
each work, an inimitability to every image. There is something iconic,
and more than iconic, to Raffael’s images—they seem inevitable,
indelible, and thus intrinsically immemorial. They are what we would
like to call perfect. There is a palpable sense that each work is
precisely right—that everything is where it must be, that amidst the
wealth of detail Raffael renders, nothing is missing and nothing is
superfluous. This is the supreme accomplishment for a work of art, and
yet there is something distinctive in Raffael’s manner of the
achievement: the inimitability of the image is not merely the result of
proper composition. The paintings are composed masterfully, but they are
not the product only of correct artificiality—they are also natural. The
image is to be found in nature, just as we see it—or certainly we are
convinced that we might as easily come upon it in nature as we have in a
painting. And thus, the impeccability of the image is a found thing,
something that can be located beyond the mind. The flawlessness of the
image is not devised, but discovered. Inimitability is something
obtained in the world.
These qualities are what Raffael shows us as the components of beauty,
but they are not formulae for the formulation of beauty, they are not
tricks of the trade—one can attempt every one of these effects and
produce an inert, uninspired composition. The only formula is to be
inspired—to know how to paint, how to see, how to feel. Beauty arises
whole, of its own, and it comes only to those, such as Raffael, who can
feel their way toward it, who can urge it to them by their passion for
it. Beauty is a thing unto itself, and these are the influences of
beauty. They are the concrete attributes of the marvelous, the prismatic
aspects of its heat along the skin of the imagination, the intimate
intricacies of the spell it casts.
And that spell, conjured as purely as Raffael now achieves it, reveals
the purposes beauty serves, shows us what beauty does to us, and for us.
The insight is divulged by the qualities of the image that stands like a
veil toward which we are drawn, that vibrates with an energy unfolding
like a rose to meet us coming to it, that forms a labyrinth centered on
a secluded core, and that possesses an inimitability rooted both in the
aesthetic imagination and in nature. Beauty is not a creation or a cast
of mind; it is an apperception—it discloses a truth, it marks and
invokes a deepened understanding, a knowledge of what can be known only
through art, that has no words to convey it. Beauty is a vision of what
lies behind the veil of appearances and yet is woven into the veil,
distilled into the nature that lies all around us. Raffael has observed
that “the act of painting is an act of nature,” and with the recognition
that the distinction between the artificial and the natural, between
what we do and what we find in the world, is itself artificial—for we
ourselves are portions of nature—our divorce from the world is
dissolved. What we seek finds us; what we move toward approaches us;
what we explore opens itself to us. This is the truth of realism, a
truth that can be told only by a supreme artist of the realistic: that
the imagination and life are alike, and that to create from life is to
return to life, to join life and the mind in a fusion that was always
there.
Clearly, all art discovers what is within us, for all art is imagined,
and there is a perennial question that nags the artistic enterprise:
whether what is within us is the same as what is without us, whether the
world and the mind respond to each other because they are identical.
Does art unveil something beyond the limits of the imagination? The
evidence of Raffael’s paintings is that it does, that what is within us
is an extension of what is outside us, for in looking to the natural
world, he has found the heart of his imagination, and in creating out of
his artistic nature, he has located what is in the nature within which
we live. Raffael’s explorations of the world are explorations of his
self, but not the self we believe ourselves to be. Rather, he has
located a larger Self, a Self that participates in, that is natural to,
a larger world, a world beyond evident nature as it is beyond our
assumed selves. “The Self is above and beyond who and what we believe we
are. This act of painting is to help make that invisible visible.” And
the larger Self is the soul that such poets as Rumi have told us come
from elsewhere. Where it comes from, where it lives, is a larger
reality, an invisible realm, a realm beyond the normal senses, the
senses of all perhaps but a master artist.
There is a writer who once observed, as many have, that there are two
kinds of people in the world—he divided them into those who believe
there is treasure in the field and those who do not. So too, there are
only two kinds of artists, and there are only two kinds of art lovers.
Either one believes what we see here, what Raffael shows us, or one does
not. And yet, there is no need of belief, for there is evidence, and the
evidence is the beauty of his work. It is the tangible product of an art
of exploration, the palpable result of discovery. There is no denying
the overwhelming sensation of Raffael’s art, the visual effect that goes
beyond all the specifiable visual attributes of his images—the
breathtaking mood that leaves us speechless. That sensation is real, and
it must be accounted for. It is the precipitate of the fully developed
artistic journey, the physical distillation of his spiritual expedition,
the evidence that has been returned from wither the artist goes—the
thing itself, as it were, brought back alive.
In the art world, we live in a time of spiritual famine, a time in which
the belief in the treasure, in the authenticity, in the truthfulness of
the aesthetic vision has been lost. Here is Raffael’s proper place in
art history: he has retained and nurtured his belief, he has kept the
artistic faith, the faith that there is more than treasure, that there
is wonder and awe and, better still, that there is the aesthetic
quality, that the universe itself is a work of art, musical and
magical—that the universe is a song. To realize this and to display it
is to accomplish the kind of art one creates when one has made one’s way
home, when one has achieved a fully flowered artistic maturity. It is to
show us what was always there for us to understand, to show us the art
in nature and the nature of art, such that, as T. S. Eliot wrote in “The
Four Quartets,” we may “arrive where we started / And know the place for
the first time.” It is to make what we know renewed.
©Mark
Daniel Cohen, 2005
Complete and unedited version of Mark Daniel Cohen Essay
for Joseph Raffael/Nancy Hoffman Gallery Catalogue 2005.