Mystic Lily

Joseph Raffael

This small aquatint is printed on a sheet of BFK Rives paper that measures 30 x 22" and is signed in a green pencil halfway down the lower margin.

In the mid 1970s, while living in California, Joseph Raffael began working on a series of paintings and prints that concentrated on the effects of light on natural structures, often using the interaction of water and flowers as subjects for this exploration. "Mystic Lily" is handled like an oil painting, with the lily and the lily pads floating on a black background, water in shadow.

Raffael makes the following comment in his autobiography: "1975, January-my first visit to Hawaii is sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior as part of a Bicentennial program inviting artists to honor the United States. A touring exhibition of paintings by the participating artists follows, called America 1976; I exhibit Island Magic. My return flight from Hawaii is delayed for several hours, so I leave the airport; in Hilo during the wait, I discover and photograph a lily pond. I had taken more than a thousand slides during my Hawaii trip, but when I return to my studio, I realize that the lily ponds are what I want to paint."

Joseph Raffael was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933. He showed an interest in art in early childhood and, after contracting spinal meningitis when he was ten years old, he spent much of his time restricted to his bed, drawing and studying the landscape and neighborhood from his window. At the request of his father, he was taken out of Catholic school and placed in the local public school— a fortuitous event, as at Midwood High School he was able to join the Art Club. Soon after, he began taking life drawing classes on Sundays at the Brooklyn Museum.

He attended Cooper Union from 1953-54 studying under Sidney Delevante, John Ferren, and Leo Manso. To support himself, he worked as a clerk at the Central Circulation Department at the New York Public Library. In the summer of 1954 he attended the Yale University-Norfolk School of Music and Art on a fellowship. With the encouragement of instructor Bernard Chaet, he went on to study at the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1954-56. There he studied under Josef Albers. Deciding to pursue a career rather than a Master’s degree, he worked as a freelance artist at the Jack Price Textile Studio and continued painting on weekends. He received a Fullbright Scholarship in 1958 and studied abroad in Florence and Rome until 1960, when he returned to the United States and began exhibiting. In 1969 he relocated from the East Coast to Marin County, California. By the early 1970s he had established the style and subject matter he would become known for, incorporating themes of water and flora in watercolor and printmaking form.

Raffael taught at the University of California at Davis (1966), University of California at Berkeley (1969), and California State College at Sacramento (1973). In 1973 he quit teaching to focus full time on producing work and exhibiting, though he accepted a post as a guest teacher at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico in 1975, working in color lithography. He exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad and continued to paint until very near his death on July 12, 2021, in France.