The evocative tone that Raftery imparts to the work comes, in part, because he includes himself in these deceptively simple narratives—clearly engaged in what he is undertaking at that moment and unaware of being observed. What might seem a near-haunting quality of his work is situated, perhaps, in what he describes as “the in-between areas.” “The way the shadows hit the grass,” he explains, “or the quality of light in the sky, or the way the brilliant sunlight hits the shingles—those types of things we don’t necessarily notice directly, but they inform our understanding of the whole image.”
Spotting details that might be missed during a first, second, or even third viewing of the plates is one of the pleasures of Raftery’s exhibition at The Huntington. Rich in architectural and natural elements, the plates’ designs offer a wealth of small, everyday details that upon close examination convey a sense of discovery: an electrical cord on a porch, a car barely visible on a nearby street, carefully delineated foliage, the clothes worn by Raftery’s gardener-avatar.
There is unexpected humor: A stop sign listing precariously to one side on a street corner is subtly visible in two of the scenes. “Providence is such a beautiful city,” says Raftery, “but sometimes our maintenance isn’t what it could be. Across the street from my mother there is a stop sign that somebody crashed into. Trees have come down, different people have moved in and out, but that stop sign is still angled like that. It’s a reminder that this is a real place.”
Andrew Raftery, May: Cultivating Lettuce, 2009–16, engravings transfer printed on glazed white earthenware, diameter: 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from Richard Benefield and John F. Kunowski. © Andrew Raftery.
"The attention to detail in the plates is stunning," says Catherine Hess, The Huntington's chief curator of European Art. "And there is this sense of delight that comes through. It's a wonderful match for us and our collecting activities: Raftery is an American, yet it's a British art form, it involves prints, it involves ceramics, it involves plants, and it involves the poignant topic of the passage of time—a nice thing to contemplate in a garden."
“The Autobiography of a Garden” happened in several stages and across a variety of media. Raftery first made sketches, then detailed drawings of plants and architectural elements. He added images of himself as a character in his narrative, based on photographs, to circular wash drawings showing the basic composition of each scene. “I would set up a tripod and pose for that,” he says. To refine the likeness and physical presence of his character in the finished paintings, Raftery crafted wax maquettes to use as scale models. After tracing his finished paintings on clear acetate and scanning, shrinking, and transferring the black-line tracings to sheets of copper, he began engraving. Each engraved scene, he notes, took “three or four months, just working it out by carving it line by line.”
Andrew Raftery, June: Training a Passion Vine, 2009–16, engravings transfer printed on glazed white earthenware, diameter: 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from Richard Benefield and John F. Kunowski. © Andrew Raftery.
In a video of Raftery at work on the project, he gazes intently through heavy-duty magnifiers as he leans in to make small, precise marks with a single engraving tool (a burin) on a flat sheet of copper. The intimacy of the process is striking. “It seems like it’s the whole world,” Raftery agrees. “I’m just concentrating on moving from mark to mark, and I’m always thinking about the relationship between the spacing and the width of every mark in relationship to any other marks that are in the image. Even though I’m looking very carefully, so much of it happens by feeling it with my body. There’s a real relationship between what’s happening in the mind, through the eyes, and then through the body, and then sort of feeling how the tool is going through the copper. It is extremely involving.”
Just the act of building up the lines in an engraving, Raftery notes, “keeping track of how deep they are and how far apart they are, considering how every line relates to the whole, is such a powerful experience. Stroke to stroke to stroke,” he says, “it doesn’t seem small when I’m doing it. It seems really vast to be involved in that plate. I find that to be quite a magical thing. I’m always so happy when I’m teaching engraving to my students and they get the feeling that they’re in the plate and it’s the whole world while they’re working on it.”
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