Joseph Raffael

Joseph Raffael interview with Tricia and Thaddeus Scott
Cap d'Antibes, France, April 2006
To download the Audio interview click here

Tricia: (Looking at the painting "Spirit" in progress) So I'm wondering how does it start, what is the process, where does the painting begin? It starts with you capturing this moment in a photograph. You take your own pictures right?

Joseph: Yes, I do. When I feel the moment is right, I go out with my camera and see if there's anything which strikes me in that moment to take a picture of. It depends on the light, it depends on my mood, and also lots of other things I'm unaware of. 

The French call a photographer ‘un chasseur d'images’ (‘a hunter of images’.) It can often feel that way - the excitement of the hunt.  In this instance, about six months ago, I went down to the pond, and took a lot of pictures using a new digital camera. You know how it is with the digital - it’s really easy to take a lot at once because...

Tricia: … because they’re not as precious.

Joseph:  Exactly. In the photos I've taken in the past, very often my chosen views have been 'field views,' an image which goes from left to right and back, and up and down, an overall lateral view. However, as I was quickly clicking away at the moving fish, I zoomed in. I couldn't have anticipated the image I got. I didn't know that there was going to be this vertical fish cutting the picture right in half, making a big white cross, like a crucifixion or something. I wouldn't have chosen this white fish vertically cutting the picture plane exactly in half. I didn't choose it. One of the big 'don't do's’ in art is you don't cut the composition in half. Atleast that's what I learned in school. Yet, there the photo was - a perfect union of shapes and forms which I could never have set up or imagined. With a digital camera it all happens so quickly.  

I knew I just had to make a painting of it. I started referring to it as "the Lollapalooza." What appealed to me, what made me yearn to do it, was that it was so strong, so present, so centered, so different compositionally; and there was all that blue. The white fish moving upwards and smack in the middle of all that blue was my reason for choosing it.

That idea of centeredness turns out to be something that's been going on in my choices of subject recently. I notice I've been choosing a central focus in my painting and in my thinking.

Tricia: Did you feel that coming on or was it a gradual process?

Joseph: I wasn't aware of it. However, let’s put it this way, I've been trying to get 'centered' all my life. (He laughs.)

Tricia: Yeah, I can see that. I see that there's this main focus here in the body of the vertical fish. However, I notice that with what you paint the specific subject is never just simply that - it’s like a fish is never… just a fish. You know, it's more like an explosion of color and depth. So, I can understand that you can approach it without any fear that it wouldn’t work out because it’s become so much more merging, while inter-relating with everything around it.

Joseph: I feel that too.  The reason it will always work out is that it’s not the photograph I'm trying to duplicate - it’s all the tiny flowing abstract parts on the white surface appearing little by little, stroke by stroke; colors merging with other colors forming that which, eventually when finished, will be 'the painting'.

That's the exciting part ---- watching it appear, something emerges which I couldn’t possibly have foreseen beforehand. The 'inconceivable' reveals itself.

Tricia:  I love that. 

Joseph:  Yes, it's thrilling that aliveness and inevitability.  I believe that is what you are sensing and seeing, when you stand up close to the painting.

Tricia:  You know it is an explosion of color. The photograph is just a starting point for you. When you’re actually painting, a very different momentum ensues. 

You also have up on the studio walls photos for possible future paintings.

Joseph: That's right.  I like living with the photographs on the walls and coming upon them unexpectedly, always seeing them afresh. Already I’ve got them up on the wall which means that I’m attracted to them as possible painted works.

It can take six months, or even several years, to know if the photo’s image could become a strong painting.  I learn if it could hold its own as a large painting, sometimes up to seven feet or so long.

Tricia:   You become so close to a painting while doing it, and then you let it go out into the world. Then right away you have to be focusing on the next one. What are the comments that you get or the responses you have heard about your works? Do they influence you?

Joseph:  Well, I wish I could answer that, but I can’t. I don’t hold on to what people say because it can be too… leadening. Of course feedback is encouraging in the moment, and I always appreciate what people say, but I never hold onto it because then I would have to, how shall I say, live up to some kind of concept that is out there about what people like, or what they don’t like.  

The wonderful thing about doing a painting and let’s say being able to live from painting, is that one needs only one person to buy a painting to make the painting, in a way, a success.

Tricia:  Yeah, yeah!

Joseph: You make a record you have to sell a million copies, or 600,000 or whatever it is. If it's a movie you have to make 30 million dollars on the first weekend. It's similar for an author who has to sell many, many copies for a work to be considered a success. It's not the same for a painter.

Tricia:  Well, so was there a point then in your career that you stopped listening to what other people had to say about your work?

Joseph: Well, you know, a long, long time ago I learned something crucial. When I was beginning to show, there used to be an art critic for the New York Times named John Canaday. At the time there were probably only one or two art critics writing for that paper. Canaday was quite influential, and well known because he had written some books which had had popular mass appeal. At the time, in the ‘60s, I had a show at the Stable Gallery. The paintings were very realistic; they were what we call 'the white ground paintings'. 

In these works there would be isolated, fragmented realistic details on a white ground. Elements like an arm, or an animal, or a logging-truck, or an exotic flower combined in a kind of rebus.

Canaday thoroughly panned these multiple images on these white ground oil paintings. He said something to the effect, “it's a pity that Raffael, with his talent, does this thing with the white.”

He didn’t like the paintings at all. He was knocking, knocking, knocking the use of the white ground being such a prominent element. Then, about two years later, I had another show at the Stable.  I had gone from the images being cut up and separate from each other to painting whole images, which went out to the edge of the canvas in each direction. The white ground disappeared. With this show and these 'whole' images, that same critic wrote, "one misses the white in Raffael."  (He laughs.)

These full image pieces were getting back to a certain centeredness. Before them, the white ground paintings had been a visual map of my psychological state at the time - my father had died in 1962. 

I was reeling in a way from that experience, somehow shattered and in pieces. I was all over the place, and in a way quite like the paintings. The white ground fragmented paintings mirrored that head and heart space.   

Then with time, a restructuring, a coalescing was taking place. I was becoming more whole, and the disparate fragmented sense and view of things lessened, the floating pieces in the white space disappeared. See what I mean about the difference between the different pieces in the painting becoming one?

Tricia: I think the John Canaday story is a good lesson.

Thad: Who knows what led up to that review? It’s a great lesson.

Joseph: When this happened, I was a relatively young artist, and so I learned early on the ephemeral and quixotic aspect to art reviews, people's opinions, and judgments. 

Here's another lesson I learned in the ‘60s. If an artist was unknown, as I was, and wanted a gallery to see their works, one had to bring, or get a selection of work to them somehow, so that it could be considered. Well, I made an appointment with a 57th Street gallery dealer, and packed some works into a yellow cab and schlepped them uptown from the Village. By the time I got there, after having maneuvered the pieces in and out of the taxi, getting them into and out of the elevator, and, of course, being nervous throughout, I was surprised when upon seeing the works the gallery dealer said to me: "What are you wasting my time for with this shit." And then she walked away, and just left me standing there.

Tricia:  I think it’s amazing that people have such an attitude with judging artwork. When you’ve worked so hard and put your heart into it, and also you’re looking for appreciation. Were you able to just go “OK”?

Joseph: I was of course surprised, shocked, and disappointed but in a way… yes, I was OK.

All these people are angels in disguise and they’re all encouragers for our art. Ultimately it was a great gift, that lesson. You know, it’s like the Zen master - he’ll do all sorts of surprising, unexpected, un-wished for, sometimes seemingly cruel things to make the student come to a self-realization. For me, this person, and her reaction, turned out to be exactly what I needed to experience. Both those events for me, the art critic and the art dealer, were crucial in showing me what the being-an-artist-in-the-world-terrain could be. 

If you are going to be an artist, you have to be like an Olympic athlete. They have a career. Let’s say a sports person has a career which lasts maybe 20 years. They have to train every day. If you’re going to be an artist, it’s the same thing. However it's a lifetime of training. You need to train, to have the stamina to go the whole way.  And the training never ends. The training never ends.  It’s horrible.  It's wonderful. You have to keep training in order to keep the art and the artist, you know, moving, developing...

Tricia: Yeah, not only your art, craft, and talent evolve but your spiritual growth is intertwined with that also. Your consciousness is forced to 'move' along as well with your art. 

Joseph: Another big learning moment for me was when I first came to Europe. Landed in Plymouth by ship, then took the train up to London.  That Sunday, I got the London Observer and in it was a little article called “A Writer’s Catechism,” by Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s brother. He wrote that the worst thing for a writer is to have somebody standing over the writer's shoulder while he or she is writing, observing what was coming forth and what might come forth. Or people commenting on your work, while you're in the process of doing it or after it's completed. It’s all very tricky.

We all have lessons along the way and these were a couple of mine. 

Tricia: Before today, we’ve spoken about your and Lannis' decision to come to live and work here in France on the Côte d'Azur in this house, this spot, in 1986. Your work is this place, I look at your work, the subject matter, the spirit and it is this place. Do you ever think of the other artist you would have been, or what you’d be doing as far as subject matter is concerned, if you weren't here in this spot?  This is constant inspiration, isn't it?

Joseph: Yes, it is. I feel if we hadn't come here 22 years ago, I'm sure the work would be very different - on many levels. Before that, I had been an artist in New York, where I had some recognition, and as soon as I got the recognition I left New York. Then I went out to Northern California. Then when I got recognized there, appreciated there, I left there too. Why? Because, in part, I found that I began identifying too much with what people thought of me, of my art. And as soon as that happens, one can get concretized into a mold, and that’s very unhealthy, for both artist and the art.

Fortunately, I had met Lannis, and luckily lots of quote-unquote "negative or serious" things happened in my life to spur me on to follow my dreams, and as it turned out, for Lannis to follow her dreams too.

The 'career' aspect of being an artist got to me. I had to get the hell out of that context to keep my artist alive and growing. I needed to return to a more innocent, purer me - to retrieve 'my original self, my original artist'.

Donald Kuspit recently described this place as a hortus conclusus - an enclosed garden. The French have an expression 'le jardin secret,' meaning one's own inner place where one's being abides, where one feels whole and 'oneself', away from the illusion of the world. If we hadn't come here to retrieve the soul and life energy of my 'artist', I think my 'artist' would have been dead by now. I mean, I literally would have died, because my 'original artist' would have died, just dried up and died. My duty was to keep my artist alive. So, Lannis and I came here to follow a dream, a dream directed to us by our inner selves, to regain our way.

In fact the final show before we moved to France at Nancy Hoffman's gallery was called "A Dream Remembered." Leaving there and coming here, I was seeking to refind the innocence of the artist I had been at four or five years old, who spent hours and hours drawing with Crayolas on the floor. 

Tricia:  Was it very hard to get back to?

Joseph: Yeah, it took time and the process has been wonderful. It’s been hard, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It’s about taking the responsibility for one's life, and the choices we make are our portals opening up to living a more conscious life or not. That’s what this move and time have been about. 

Thad: So speaking of the tools you are now using in the process of making your art. How did you make this change - using the computer, and how has it changed your work?

Joseph: That's been a really interesting process. The computer came into my life the way it’s been coming into all our lives, and with it, Sam, this young man who works here, has opened it all up to me and for me, in a way that could not have happened without him. He has a very inventive and original mind, and is a whiz with the computer. He encouraged me to switch from working with paper photographs as my point of departure, to working directly from the image, seeing it on the computer screen. So, it's been Sam who has seen me through the mechanical aspects. He takes care of all that. I don’t have to do any of the technical stuff - Sam does it. I'm freed to paint as much as possible. He showed me how I could zoom in and blow up details.  It's been such a revelation. Now, he has even set up a video projector attached to the ceiling for me to use to draw in the original image on the paper. One thing led to another. I resisted for about six months then realized about five weeks ago that it was the next step.  It turns out to be absolutely thrilling working directly from the screen and being able to zoom in and see details of the image really large. This way, there's so much to see, so much visual information. The light coming from behind the photographic image is also more luminous.  

Tricia: Well it’s what you’ve been doing all along with your eye, and the photograph on paper - but now there's this new tool.

 Joseph: This new tool, this digital image has a different kind of detail than the analog image. Actually this image of the vertical white fish isn't all that detailed. This one is quite, umm, quite simple, isn’t it?

So it will be interesting to see what happens when I do get into a detailed image.... I’ll probably go mad. No matter how simple the image is I see such complexities in it. It's like my mind breaks everything down into cellular realities.

Thad: Have you ever started the journey here and gotten to there and said this is a completely different journey? Or do you just always accept that there’s always going to be changes, there’s going to be the journey down a winding path, and that where it began and where it is will be completely different, and you accept the whole. Or have you gotten so far at the end and said this is a different journey at this point.

Tricia: Boy, it’s… it’s really different. Where it begins with the photograph and how you transform it.

 Joseph: It's always a journey. In the painting, when I go from here to there, or when I go from one point to another, the journey does change.  In fact it’s always changing. It's a visual, physical journey in time and space. No two moments are alike. Every inch of what is emerging begs to be its own self. I never know what's coming around the corner. I need to be open to the ‘new’ which wants to be seen, each and every moment. Continual change, like life. Nothing remains the same.

Tricia: It seems like your work is very embracing of what wants to enter the work. It seems like your work, and you and Lannis have more, I guess the term would be such 'acceptance' of what appears, more than anyone, almost anyone I’ve ever met.

Joseph: Well, that’s definitely true of Lannis. She accepts everything.

Tricia: You've said you feel the universe is supporting each one of us. It seems as though you take that same philosophy into your work.  And yet at times, I’m sure your work feels like a struggle which every artist feels. 

Joseph: Yes, every day, every day.  Often it used to feel like it was a lot of struggle, and then there’d be this energy in the daily process, a little glimmer that kept me going. Actually, it has changed in the past year or so, and now I feel much calm energy in the daily process.  

I notice that during the 'journey,' as Thad calls it, during the making of the painting, when there are sections I don't 'like', that don't look the way I would have had them look, or that I wish just hadn't happened, that in fact, when the painting's finished these are the areas I most appreciate.  They're so often the 'heartbeats' of the piece.   They are what make the painting alive and breathing. 

Sometimes, I'll see these sections when they first appear and I'll ask myself, "Who painted that? I would never paint that! I would never paint anything like that!" And yet they turn out to be the 'best' parts of the painting. They are in fact the 'real’ gifts.

It’s about trying to remain focused, and totally open, and conscious all at the same time.

Thad: Do you have moments when you’re working where you feel like you’re slipping into sort of an autopilot and you’re not giving enough, like you’re falling back into old things that are comfortable and familiar to you and that you have to tell yourself, push it, push it.

Joseph: Aaah... How can I answer that?

Thad: I don’t know if that’s a fair question.

Joseph: It's a fine question. I don't go into auto-pilot. The process of painting has its own rhythm and flow. There are long stretches of time when I withdraw from the decision making and the painting just moves slowly and quietly forward. See what I mean?  I don’t know if that answers your question or not.

Thad: I think it does.

Last time we were here, you were saying I think that with watercolor you can’t fix your ‘mistakes.’

Joseph: No you can’t.  Though I don't really believe in 'mistakes'. The thing about watercolor which I find fascinating, I've said this over and over, that when it's wet, when it's just been painted, it looks one way and when it dries, the wetness, the water, has seeped elsewhere, even changing patterns and forms. All the relationships of color-to-color change. It’s very liberating because my limited self is no longer in control - it's the painting itself which decides how it will look and be. 

Tricia: It’s different - the initial touching the paper and then what you see minutes later, hours later, it really changes.

Joseph: For example this painting we're looking at. There isn't a centimeter in it that is the way it looked when I painted it. It metamorphoses. 

Tricia:  So part of it is the accepting, that the medium, in this case watercolor, and the painting have a life of their own. And you give it that life and let it...

Joseph: ...and let it go ---

Tricia: Let it go.

Joseph: Yes.

Tricia: It feels like there are some moments where you’re creating a kind of a new reality.

Joseph: This area here was sort of like that - a Zen moment. There are many new realities which appear. Hopefully the whole work will be a new reality. After all, it’s a painting, it’s not recreating a photograph. Isn't this what art does? Create new realities. 

Tricia: To stand here in front of this work and to be here in the environment where you create, it’s ah, it’s electric. I mean for me, it’s almost unreal how there’s so much energy going on in the painting and to see where you start, to see where you take the image from the initial photograph - it’s indescribable.

Joseph: Well, thanks for saying that.  That’s what happened to me the other day, when I was sitting in front of it pausing to look at the painting, which I almost never do. Just now as you were talking, I was just gazing upon a certain area. I wasn't really looking at this particular area - I wasn’t looking, that’s the thing, I was gazing, I was really 'seeing.'

Something’s happening here, that I know. I've never painted anything like this before. Of course, I've painted fish before, yet this is new. I find myself saying so often this is happening "just in the nick of time." 

Tricia:  When I let myself start looking, and gazing at this painting, it's not like fish anymore. It's like a journey of color. I mean they could be islands we're looking at.

Joseph: Definitely.

Tricia: There’s so much movement. Each change of color and each change of the light blues and dark blues.  

Joseph: I believe what we’re talking about, that which transforms and moves towards the finished work of art, is how this other reality can be let through. Letting that which did not exist before come through as 'art' is such a difficult and subtle tight-rope walking process, and that's why there can be much pain, doubt, and confusion in it, and why artists sometimes become disturbed and suffer acutely, because they go to an interior space where they are very alone, and there they connect with an unknown, the not-experienced before. They enter this domain from which 'creativity' springs forth. 

Thanks for bringing this up because that’s what happened to me the other day when I was just sitting right here, gazing towards the painting on the wall. I never knew what an epiphany was. It's a word that came into fashion in the United States after we had come over here. I first heard it a lot when I returned one year to the States, and I heard my brother-in-law Chris Desmond say something about "epiphany".  I had thought it was something about the Catholic Church. I thought it was a feast day or something.

I didn’t know what an epiphany was - and since then I never got the sense of how, why, or when to use it. However, the other day I was sitting here with Lulu, our dog, gazing at the painting, and I experienced what you just described. It was like I was perhaps having an epiphany. Whatever it was, it seems to be the only word I can use to describe the experience.

So that’s what a painting is supposed to do! Take speech away. Transport the viewer to the inexplicable, the non-verbal. Art can be living proof in an external, experiential way of that which we can only know within the silence of our inner being. It shows us that we’re part of something much larger than what we see before us in the outer world. It reminds us of who we are.

That’s why writing about art is so hard and almost impossible. The art experience cannot be explained in words.  It’s like Edvard Munch said, “When people see my paintings, I want them to stop and take off their hat as though they were in church." The older I get the more I understand deeply what that Munch quote means. Great art inspires awe - deep reflection and silence - not words.