Joseph Raffael was born in Brooklyn in 1933. He received his B.F.A. from Yale University and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Florence and Rome in 1958-59 and a Tiffany Fellowship in 1960. He resides in France.
Raffael's new paintings are an on-going celebration of nature and the spirit of life's force as manifest in the movement of fish and ducks in water or lilies floating on the surface of a pond. The watercolors demand more of the artist in theircomplexity.
His large and luminous watercolors venture into new territories of color, juxtaposing glowing gold with deep mysterious rich blues and greens. His often written about "jewel-like" passages are richer now than ever. Crystal-clear blue butts up against azure, purple against emerald green against shining black, a splendor of bubbling, moving paint.
While heralding that which is beautiful in nature, the artist also invites the viewer into a meditation, a heightened awareness and appreciation for nature's abundance. Pursuing his love of and for nature, and exploring deeper into its mysteries, Raffael takes the viewer to a new, more complex, heightened place with his monumental scale watercolors.
To capture the essence of what the eye cannot always see, Raffael probes the secrets of nature's private and splendid moments. From his larger-than-life dramatic flowers to koi filled with light, shimmer and motion in his own, newly-created koi pond, the artist heightens our senses to the world "outside." Several of the artist's watercolors are diptychs. For Raffael, working on more than one piece of paper represents a continuum of art history. From the Renaissance altarpieces with panels and predellas, the artist draws his interest and his commitment to multi-panelled pieces, sometimes screens (including five or more panels), at other times diptychs.