JOSEPH RAFFAEL
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joseph Raffael was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1933. He attended Cooper Union from 1953-54, and received his B.F.A. from Yale School of Fine Arts in 1956 after studying with Josef Albers on a summer fellowship at Yale in 1954. From 1958-59 he had a Fulbright Fellowship to Florence and Rome. In 1966 he taught at the University of California, Davis, from 1967-69 at the School of Visual Arts in New York, from 1969-74 at California State University at Sacramento. In 1986 he moved to the South of France where he resides in Antibes.
IMAGERY AND INSPIRATION
Raffael’s art has earned critical praise ever since the mid-60s, while he was living in New York City and, later, in Marin County, California. In 1965, he had a solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. In 1972 he began his “water painting” series using photographs of rivers taken for him by painter friend William Allan. He became well known with a 1973 Time Magazine article by Robert Hughes "A Slice of the River,” showcasing his signature water paintings. Hughes called Raffael “a very American figure recognizable from his 19th-century prototypes along the Hudson River and the Yosemite Valley; the painter as Italian altar boy in the cathedral of nature. These sumptuous works both dazzle and pull the viewer into the whirling vortex or the painting with a quiet force. Despite their iconic serenity when seen from a distance, Raffael’s paintings disclose a bejeweled profusion of incident close up.”
In 2016, for the first time in 20 years, Raffael moved away from his previous large-format work and began an ongoing series of small-format watercolor paintings. In his newest work Raffael combines his love of nature with that of animals in a series he calls “spirit beings.” The artist has long been in a dialogue with beauty, a constant conversation with brush in hand. He has said: “My painting has always been a conversation with mystery.”