Joseph Raffael

Joseph Raffael was born in Brooklyn in 1933 and studied first at Cooper Union before obtaining his bachelor of fine arts degree from Yale School of Art in 1956 under Josef Albers. He travelled to Florence and Rome from 1958 to 1959 on a Fulbright Fellowship and received a Louis C. Tiffany award in 1970. Raffael has taught at the University of California, Davis, the School of the Visual Arts in New York, and California State University at Sacramento. The artist explains that his figurative paintings explore the wonders of the natural environment.