Andrew Raftery
Printmaker Andrew Raftery is a patient man. His last two major works—Suit Shopping and Open House—each took him up to six years to complete. Over the past decade, the boyish-looking Raftery has revived the labor-intensive art of copperplate engraving, bringing that old master technique to bear on his carefully observed depictions of twenty-first-century life. Writing about Open House, Raftery's suite of five engravings delineating a single moment occurring simultaneously in different rooms of a house for sale, Elaine Sexton observed in the April 2009 issue of Art in America, "the project quietly telegraphs the gravity to be found in the everyday, offering both irony and surprise." The same could well be said about Electra Webb's museum.
Born in North Carolina in 1962, Raftery received his BFA from Boston University's School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Yale University's School of Art. He was trained as a painter, but he has been making prints since he was eleven, "so my graphic sensibilities are pretty deeply ingrained," he says. He began exploring copperplate engraving about a decade ago, and, like Michelle Erickson rediscovering how historical ceramic bodies were formulated, he has been working to re-create through copying and experimentation the exact techniques used by the old masters. But in both Suit Shopping and Open House, he takes the traditional visual clarity afforded by the medium a step further by creating his images—volume, texture, perspective, detail, everything—entirely with parallel strokes of the burin.
Given the time-consuming process and the painstaking precision he achieves in his engravings, it may come as something of a surprise that what intrigued Raftery most at the Shelburne Museum were the hatboxes, or bandboxes. Turned out in huge numbers in the United States in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, they were decorated with comparatively simple woodblock prints, often in three or four colors. "My first impression of the intense atmosphere created by the colors, lighting and installation" of the bandboxes "promised a rich and varied experience," he says. "I appreciated the curatorial premise" offered by the different ways they were displayed—"some with hats and accessories massed to suggest their original function, some in well-lit cases providing an objective view of individual objects, and then towers of boxes that emphasize their sculptural nature. It allowed the material to speak in many ways and reveal its story through prolonged contemplation."
And prolonged contemplation is what Raftery gave the boxes. On Saturday morning he asked if he could be left alone with them to sketch while the others were touring, and he spent many hours in the dimly lit interior doing so. Actually, what captured his imagination as much as any of the displays were the paneled walls Webb had originally installed in bedrooms of the family's house on Long Island, on which she had framed the tops and sides of disassembled boxes that had been broken or ripped. "By excerpting and recombining the images Mrs. Webb created new narratives and pointed up the open-ended and even cryptic qualities inherent in the separate scenes," Raftery observed.
On his return to Providence, where he is an associate professor of printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, he took time to study the comparable examples at the RISD Museum and looked into the woodblock techniques used to make the prints. "They are printed with glue-based paints (distemper). The paper is painted with a middle value base color and printed from several blocks inked with lighter and darker colors. This is very similar to the technique used to print the panoramic wallpapers of the early nineteenth century," another subject that interests him greatly, particularly how "the fictive space of the landscape breaks through the confines of the actual wall. The hatboxes attempt to create a similar spatial effect on the outside of a cylinder, inverting the panoramic wraparound structure of the wallpaper." This is a challenge Raftery would like to explore himself. "I have started drawing gardens around Providence to generate imagery for my new engraving project, and maybe even a hatbox or two," he writes. We will wait patiently.
Next: Ted Muehling
Gemellion, Artist unknown, Limoges, France, 13th century Champlevé Enamel on Copper, 8 7/8” diameter Collection of The Walters’ Art
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