Book Notes

It has been quite some time since I posted anything. It’s time for me to get back into gear. Life has been very introspective lately. My doctors have been working on fine-tuning the balance of my medications. Where it adds in one place it sometimes detracts in another place. But I have been happy with the results. Not only is my focus better but also my attention span has slightly increased. This in combination with using the cold wax medium I discovered is helping me to make new some old things.


After years of searching and experimenting, the wax medium gives me the ability to get a similar affect in oils to what I had with pastels. I am pretty happy about this. I am able to build up separate and individual strokes in multiple layers with minimal intermixing on the surface. A lot of what is happening on the surface goes back to attitudes from when I was doing color field paintings. There is also a slight color shift. The paintings are still bright just not garishly intense. I am working slower and with more deliberation. I will write more about this later.


So what I have included here are some of the notes I have kept while reading a book on the American artist, Joseph Raffael. Reading becomes a somewhat slow process for me because I am always taking notes. I refuse to mark up a book by underlining, highlighting, or dog earring the pages. It causes too much distraction when I may go back to the book years later. It also keeps me from discovering something new in the book. Anyhow, I hope that you find the notes interesting.


The paintings included here are my experiments with the wax medium and using a technique similar to what I did with pastels. The still life of the apples measures 20” X 24” and is done on a hardwood panel using oils and cold wax medium. The pear still life measures 14” X 11” and is done on a hardwood panel. Again this was done with oils and cold wax medium with assorted elements added using oil pastel.


Reflections of Nature: Paintings by Joseph Raffael
By Donald Kuspit and Amei Wallach


He is an altogether twentieth-century incarnation of a pragmatic romanticism out of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Nature “is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it,” Emerson wrote. P.9

Nature in Raffael’s twentieth-century cathedral is transfused with the theories of Carl Jung; the teachings of Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff, and Tibetan Buddhism; the poetry of Rainer Maria Wilke and Wallace Stevens. P.9

“To be religious you don’t have to be part of a religion,” Raffael says. P.9

The thing about painting is that it is an activity, and it’s about life and death. P.10

Edward Hopper seems astonishingly close to Raffael in his statement of 1933, the year Raffael was born: “My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature. If this end is unattainable, so it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man’s activities.” P.10

…at New York’s Cooper Union School of Art in the early 1950s, Wallace Stevens, Jung, and Buddhism as taught by Daisetz T. Suzuki at Columbia University were the intellectual air that avant-garde painters breathed. “I am nature,” Jackson Pollock had declared, meaning that he was of nature, not merely an outside observer. P. 12

“My concern is with the rhythms of nature…the way the ocean moves…The ocean is what the expanse of the west was for me…I work from the inside out, like nature.” Pollock was quoted as saying. P.12

Albers himself may be most noted for his investigations into color through the painted medium of stacked minimal squares, but his teaching, honed in the gesamtkunst world of the Bauhaus, was more catholic. “We want a student who sees art as neither a beauty shop nor imitation of nature…but as a spiritual documentation of life,” he wrote. He taught that “color is the most relative medium in art,” and that under no circumstances should an artist get on an aesthetic bandwagon. P.13

Then, as now, Raffael’s paintings took nature as their form and abstraction as their means. They can be read either as whole or as fragmented into thousands of prismatic effects, which, like Thoreau, float with “the impetus derived from the earth and the system, a subjective heavily laden thought, in the midst of an unknown sea.” P15

Raffael married Lannis Wood…together they determined that what was needed for his art was to strip himself of all outward concerns with community and ambition. They moved to France, where painting became the core around which their days were constructed, even to the extent that they slept on a mattress in his studio. P18

Consider the duck (in the painting Galactic Waters III) as the eyeball in Thoreau’s notion of a lake as “earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” P. 21

“The mystery,” says Raffael, “is being a human being, finding oneself in this universe, and trying to make head or tail of it.” P. 23