Joseph Raffael Art

Art Brokerage: Joseph Raffael was born in Brooklyn in 1933. He received his B.F.A. from Yale University in 1957 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Florence and Rome in 1958-1959 and a Tiffany Fellowship in 1960. The time, the place is not important. What is important to Raffael is the essence, what the forest sounds like, smells like, looks like, as day is dawning, and this he masterfully captures. In his catalogue essay on the artist, John Fitz Gibbon writes, "You can feel in a Raffael his obsessive pursuit of every trick of light and leaf, every dancing reflection from a constantly shifting surface." Raffael's method of working in watercolor is unique. He paints on a flat table with tiny brushes, working wet into dry, rarely putting color on top of color. He rolls his paper to view only 20 inches at a time and thus abstracts the image. Each passage of the work demands Raffael's full attention, yielding a work of richness in every square inch of equal intensity and energy.