This article is part of our special Design section on new interpretations of antique design styles.
When Andrew Raftery, a master engraver and professor of printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, decided to make wallpaper, he opted for an 18th-century French format called domino: small sheets of letterpress paper originally produced as planks by stationery stores. paper and box liners.
The process is intricate and labour-intensive, which appeals to Mr. Raftery, an artist who uses ancient methods and crafts, such as engraving, to explore contemporary life, often his own. But unlike many artists who work with traditional techniques, he doesn’t outsource any part of the process. In fact, he generally adds more layers of preparation and research, as he calls it. This is a man who makes his own quill, from crow and goose feathers, and his own ink, from oak galls and vitriol – the same kind of ink used to sign the Declaration of Independence. He likes to take his time.
He spent two years creating a copperplate engraving of a man shopping for a suit (the prints are a story told in five scenes that have the feel of a 1940s movie). “Suit Shopping: An Engraved Narrative” was completed in 2002 and received critical acclaim in the art world. He spent another six years on a series of engravings called ‘Open House’, about the modern ritual of home shopping. The contemporary objects and images – the Saarinen tulip chair in the kitchen and the Alessi teapot, the exercise machine of a bedroom and an ever-growing crowd of strangers – are rendered in parallel crosshatching, a meticulous and vibrant technique that makes them both recognizable and strange . They rumble with omens. “Open House” earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
His next project was eight years in the making. “The Autobiography of a Garden” is a series of twelve plates depicting Mr. Raftery, a serious gardener, over the course of a year, reading seed catalogs in bed, watering a cold body and being death-headed. Each monthly activity is beautifully detailed in the applied carvings he used to make the ceramics known as transferware – for example, the shadows and folds of the winter coat he wears to dig dahlia tubers. Each has the narrative power of a John Cheever story, as artist Cary Leibowitz, co-head of the print division at auction house Phillips de Pury, said in a telephone interview.
Engraving is a marathon, not a sprint. “The important thing is practice,” said Mr. Raftery, now 61, who, in his third year of art school, took up a burin, the engraver’s tool, and was hooked. “It’s all about learning new ways to make points and new ways to get in and out of a line. If you look at historical engravings, you can see every region. It’s not like a painting that has all those layers. We’ll never really understand how Vermeer made his paintings, but in the engraving you can definitely see where the tool came in and where it went out and how hard the artist pressed.
“Andrew is slow food in an era of McDonald’s,” said Benedict Leca, executive director of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, RI, who commissioned Mr. Raftery to design wallpaper for a room in the library as part van Mr. Leca’s mission to install contemporary art in the nearly 300-year-old institution. “I don’t know if there is anyone else in the world who can create a ‘grand way’ [traditional old master] engrave burin as he can. His stuff is off the charts.”
And so on wallpaper. When Mr. Raftery finished his transferware plates, which were exhibited at the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City in 2016, he created a backdrop wallpaper for the installation, a complex design of leaves he called “Spring Salad” and that left him wanting to explore the medium further. By researching the history of wallpaper, he learned about the French tradition of producing it in small sheets. Once again he turned to his garden for inspiration. The designs he created reflect the four seasons: irises and rosemary for spring, two-tone coleus for summer, amaranths and coxcombs for fall. Skeletons of native plants – asters, goldenrod and thistles – poke through the snow in winter.
If these images sound staid, think again. They are printed in saturated, psychedelic colors that blend and pop, thanks to a complicated process that relied on the help of a local printer and artist, Dan Wood, who runs a letterpress shop in Providence.
During the early days of the Covid crisis, Mr. Raftery installed the paper himself in his 250-year-old Providence home — one season for each of its four bedrooms, using about 300 sheets per room. He followed the directions of a wallpaper school manual from the 1920s. He learned to mix wheat starch for the glue and how to put each sheet in place, stretching it back and forth so that the patterns lined up. It was a perfect method, he said, for the bumpy plaster walls of his home. Now his entire upstairs is an art installation.
On a steamy summer afternoon, he guided me through it. He and his partner, Ned Lochaya, a health company administrator, purchased the property in 2018. Built in 1765, it was used to store gunpowder during the Revolutionary War; In the mid-1800s it was moved a few hundred yards from its original location and converted into a coaching inn, with bits and pieces added to it. An architect and artist renovated it in the 1970s, but not completely. There is a modern kitchen and a studio for Mr. Raftery. When he and Mr. Lochaya bid on the house, there wasn’t much competition. (They paid $635,000, nearly 25 percent less than the original asking price.) No one else seemed to want small rooms, steeply sloped floors, low ceilings (and lower door panels); Mr. Raftery, who is six feet tall, must remember to stoop) and walls that are far from perpendicular.
‘When I saw the house,’ said Mr Raftery, ‘I couldn’t believe it. It feels like I’ve been waiting my whole life for a house like this.”
For 27 years he had lived as a graduate student, he said, in a small apartment in Providence. He had no furniture to speak of, but his apartment was filled with thousands of transferware, a staggering collection that both he and Mr. Lochaya have collected for decades. Mr. Lochaya owns a brownstone in Brooklyn, and the couple, who have been together for over thirty years, used to commute to see each other before the pandemic.
When they bought the house, they slowly filled it with antique pieces and reproductions they found at auction. It wasn’t hard. There was not much market for so-called brown furniture. They bought Windsor chairs, a Sheraton sofa, a longcase clock and many (electrified) oil lamps. They hung their collection of engraved prints, dating back to the 16th century. Mr. Raftery rotates the works every year. When I was there, there were portraits: Alexander the Great marching into Babylon; a sly-looking Louis XIV; and Madame Récamier, the 18th-century socialite, on her deathbed.
In the dining room, the transferware walls swirl, another seasonal curation, Mr. Raftery, shifts in color. Other pieces are in the basement, including the couple’s collection of American pressed glass.
“Our collecting era is before 1851,” said Mr. Raftery, “before the design reform era and the idea of ’good’ design. Then we lose interest.”
His studio housed studies of his current work, delicate watercolors of historic rooms with scenic wallpaper, which he sketched over the past two years at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware and other historic Oriental homes. (These works will be on display at the Ryan Lee Gallery in Chelsea from October 16 through November 24.) Painterly wallpaper popular in the 19th century, beautifully printed in blocks (in what are now often chilling themes), became the convey to their viewers the “Nature” of their time. Themes included tiger hunting in India; Chinese motifs; scenes from Western canon works such as “The Odyssey”; and colonialism and racism, at home and abroad.
Mr. Raftery is deeply involved in historical art practices and imagery.
“We’re all surrounded by remnants of the past, these eclectic experiences and objects that have accumulated over time,” he said. “That is what defines contemporary for me. It’s not about things that are brand new products, or images created by advertisements. We live in history. ”
