Andrew Raftery’s House and Garden, with a Twist

A master printmaker uses Old Master style and new techniques to chronicle the seasons in his Providence home.

F rom time to time I’ve profiled American artists I like, artists whose young age or medium keeps them from getting headlines. Angela Lorenz, for instance, makes the most inventive artist’s books, and these objects are precious and erudite. They’re not for the masses or the showy rich. Sheila Hicks is a fiber artist or, more precisely, a sculptor in textile. She’s well known, but fiber art’s a niche. Henri-Paul Broyard is a superb young painter whose dealer, Grant Wahlquist, is in Portland, Maine, not in beaten-track Manhattan. James Prosek is a young environmental artist, writer, and filmmaker, and the Audubon of fish.

Today I’ll write about Andrew Raftery (b. 1962), a master printmaker who lives in Providence and teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. I say “master” not only because his prints are technically first-rate. He channels the Old Master engravers such as Dürer, Goltzius, Robert Nanteuil, and Lucas van Leyden in a totally modern way.

I first saw Raftery’s work about 15 years ago when he did a series of five engravings called Open House. The series depicts an open house, a staple of the real-estate business and among the committed voyeur’s weekend hobbies. A good-size community on a spring weekend will have dozens, so they’re not big news, but they’re ceremonies nonetheless. Homes are staged for strangers, tidier than ever, and, well, they’re public events available to all comers. Raftery picked a subject that’s immediately accessible to anyone who has bought and sold a house.

For buyers and sellers, the entire enterprise of home disposal and acquisition is one of life’s biggest dramas, involving as it does a hopeful future, massive inconvenience, the excitement of redecorating, and boatloads of spending. I’ve sold three houses. On open-house days, we, like every seller, exited for the duration. Evacuating our very indoor cat seemed to her, at least, a tragedy on the order of Chernobyl.

An engraving starts with a copper plate, burin, and artist. A burin is a tool with a narrow, sharp, steel edge that the artist uses to cut his design into the plate. The artist inks the plate, finds an elegant paper, paper with character, puts it through the press, and what we see, in Raftery’s case, is an homage to line. A line isn’t just a line. In his hands, it ranges from a dot with the tiniest stretch to long lines that start thin but then swell. Forms from people to furniture to trees look real but are made from straight lines. Raftery is a shadow master.

When I first looked at these prints, I never imagined a straight line could be so luscious and lively. It’s a modern line, though, since it’s both economical and insistent. Isolate a figure, and the viewer sees it’s made from parallel lines, seductively simple, but we all know simplicity is a rare discipline.

Engraving can offer cross-hatching for special effects, but curves and squiggles are tough to make since the burin cuts into hard, resistant metal. For a wilder line, artists need to etch, and that medium came years after engraving. Etchers — and the giants are Rembrandt, Goya, and Whistler — usually aim at atmosphere and movement, both ephemeral. An engraved line demands that the viewer study it. It’s got serious presence. A good line is statuesque. An etched line, serpentine, meandering, sometimes wiggling, has sass. Engraving is more about architecture than whimsy.

The series moves from the home’s living room to the empty dining room — a triumphant still life — and the kitchen, upstairs hallway, and master bedroom. The scenes juxtapose the discipline of line against the informality of the invaders. Men wear shorts and sandals, adults haul babies, cabinets are opened and ogled, a woman looks at herself in the bedroom’s full-length mirror, and a bodybuilder caresses a bench press that, like most home-exercise equipment, looks pristine from lack of use.

Raftery’s very funny. The look is Old Master, which means serious, even grand, in a style suitable for religious art or a formal portrait, like the subjects of most Old Master engravings, yet it’s an open house, for goodness’ sake, a mundane event. For bourgeois Americans, though, buying and selling real estate is a secular religion.

The living room looks like a little church, and the real-estate agent, in jacket and tie, genuflects to a seated house hunter as he makes his pitch. A bald house hunter stands before a painting on the wall depicting a massive, bulbous flower. The house isn’t a rinky-dink one. It’s got high ceilings, nice moldings, leaded windows, a baby grand, built-in cabinets, and 1960s moderne furniture. Raftery jostles formality and informality, giving the prints sizzle. And there’s that underlying mystery that’s very American: Will the thing sell?

Raftery’s next big project is called The Autobiography of a Garden on Twelve Engraved Plates, from 2016. Again, there’s narrative, in this case Raftery’s monthly garden activities. Like Open House, the plates are scenes of everyday life. The series is autobiographical, too, since the subject is Raftery and his garden. A garden is an autobiography, Raftery believes, a show of his taste and aspiration, much as a home and its decor are. The artist makes art about gardening, itself an art.

Raftery engraved each scene on a metal plate and then printed on a decal applied to twelve cream-colored earthenware plates he designed. It’s not a radical technique, since transferware china, which Raftery collects, dates from the early 1800s. These garden prints enhance Raftery’s Old Master sensibility since his narrative — how he develops his garden — is a spin on a theme of conception, birth, growth, decay, and dormancy that’s religious.

Raftery’s process is worth visiting. He starts by making wax figures, then drawing them nude, an Old Master practice, and then clothed. He did separate drawings of flowers, architecture, and atmosphere. He then made twelve round grisaille paintings, about 16 inches in diameter, that he reduced digitally and then engraved to fit the plate surface. Raftery uses stippling, another Old Master–period technique that creates the look of light and dark shading through dense dots engraved on the plate. I shouldn’t call it pointillism because that’s what Seurat did with dots of color, but it’s the same concept.

Autobiography of a Garden shows flowers, leaves, grass, and dirt — pieces of nature — but a garden is planned. Raftery’s art, in this case, doesn’t look linear. Flowers and leaves seem delicate, moving with the breeze, or they’re dense, depending in no small part on Raftery’s stipple marks. It’s profoundly analytical work, aimed to create nature’s look and feel. We don’t conceive nature as exacting or analytical, but, following its own rules, it is. Nature throws curveballs, but, overall, its patterns are invariable and timeless.

I think they’re brilliant. The first plate, January, shows Raftery in bed, reading seed catalogues as he plans for spring. The last takes us to December as he surveys his snow-covered patch of land, thinking about what he liked and what he didn’t, and launching the cycle of life again. Raftery digs, waters, mows, prunes, and picks. Seedlings eventually tower over him as man commands nature in its infancy but, sooner or later, nature takes charge.

Autobiography of a Garden is the cleverest, newest version of self-portraiture. Raftery is in all the plates. It’s his life, in a year, via his garden, and he’s there not as just another pretty face but as a physical and thinking presence.

Raftery also made the plates, working with a ceramics professor at RISD. They are based on Victorian dinner plates in their generous size and depth and are scalloped to function as frames. He makes many of his other materials, too, such as quill pens from goose and crow feathers, iron gall ink from oak galls and vitriol, and Chinese ink from rabbit-skin glue.

The plates are engravings, though the surface isn’t paper but ceramic. It’s a twist on what is a print, but that’s part of Raftery’s creativity. He expands the boundaries of printmaking using old practices such as engraving and making transferware. I also like his merger of genre art — scenes of everyday life — and landscape. Now, Raftery’s latest project is another twist on tradition: wallpaper.

Yes, wallpaper is art and sometimes exquisite art. French scenic wallpaper from the early 19th century is extreme printmaking. There, immense scale, technical complexity, and superb design give new meaning to the term “flat art,” normally used for a painting. Wallpaper originating in this period — Zuber & Zuber still produces the most refined wallpaper today — sometimes depicts America’s majestic landscape or life in Raj India and sometimes Chinoiserie motifs or simple bursts of flowers set in graceful patterns. Now, Raftery is making his own wallpaper art.

Raftery is always tossing a twist in the mix. Open House and Autobiography of a Garden are scenes of everyday life. Elegant wallpaper is frankly decorative, in the sense of looking very pretty indeed but also in making a room, even a room in an old, modest house, look like a palace. Old scenic wallpaper views of India don’t show Mother Teresa in the slums. It’s elephants, palaces, the Himalayas, turbans, and baubles. Sitting in a room with fancy wallpaper, we feel like kings and queens.

He’s starting with a wallpaper for each of the four seasons. They’re gorgeous, with handsome, intricate forms and the colors of jewels. Raftery is doing something I admire in an artist, and it’s a sign of a very good artist indeed. He consistently does something different — working in sumptuous, saturated color after years as a black-and-white printmaker is another example — while keeping faith with established themes. His wallpapers, much like Autobiography of a Garden, concern nature’s cycles. Wallpaper is art for the home, and Open House is about a home. To prepare for the project, Raftery looked not only at French scenic wallpaper but wallpapers in historic houses throughout New England.

Spring depicts irises and rosemary set against green and turquoise. Summer is the triumph of the coleus leaf, and a more various plant in color and shape is hard to find. Autumn, my favorite, is a nocturne. Each day in October see and feel less light. Nights get colder, the air drier, and the stars are best seen in sparkling clarity. Raftery’s palette is a fall one, of course, with purple, orange, and yellow, but their iridescence is spooky. Set against a deep blue, the fall colors pop as if they’re lit for the stage. It’s Halloween season, so magic’s allowed. The blue has a touch of pink in it, suggesting moonlight. It’s best seen by candlelight. Winter is a variation of creams. The plants are what New Englanders call “winter weeds,” the dregs of the previous season’s garden.

Making wallpaper isn’t for the faint of heart or the slapdash. Raftery is methodical, disciplined, and oriented toward making things by hand. He starts with drawing on graph paper, exploring motifs but also thinking about how a motif will look when repeated. He then makes a watercolor of the unit that repeats. He then makes a Rubylith negative of each design element based on its color. He’s anticipating the color separations and blends, which govern how many times the paper needs to be run through the press.

For Spring, it takes seven trips through a 1950s-era letterpress. Again, it’s an old technology. Gutenberg’s the daddy, and, even in our tech-crazy era, sometimes the old stuff still does the trick. Raftery works with a master printer in Providence. Together, they scrutinize color and registration for each layer of the design. Once they’ve got the mix they want, the design’s good for thousands of runs, if Raftery wants that many. He’s selling a limited edition, though, through Ryan/Lee, a New York art dealer.

Each of Raftery’s projects took years of planning, and he has a day job. He teaches at RISD, one of the country’s best art schools. I taught smart young people for years. It was a gift. It spurred my own creativity, as teaching does his, though when I was a museum director, that creativity tended to be channeled into asking people for money. Raftery’s creating beauty. Both are noble endeavors, and both deal, in Raftery’s and my case, with printed paper. As much as I adored my donors, these days I’m happy to immerse my eyes, soul, and energy in artists of his vision and quality.