Judith Raphael

Conversation 1
acrylic, gouache on panel
24 x 22 in.

“My painting focuses on early adolescence and comments on the human condition. In the figure I find the metaphor to express my narrative. All of life’s stages are transient but none are more rapid in their changes than childhood and no stage in childhood is more dramatic than the passage of children about to enter their teens. They experience interesting and disconcerting changes in their bodies and emotions, which embody childhood’s androgynous qualities of aggression, insouciance and outrageous expectation. It is the fountain of our future power and a stage I try to remember.”

Born in Chicago, Judith Raphael taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Moraine Valley Community College. Her paintings have appeared in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York and elsewhere. Raphael won painting or purchase prizes at the 179th National Academy Museum Invitational, the Springfield Art Museum and the Illinois Art Council. She has been the recipient of Illinois Arts Council Grants, a Regional NEA Grant, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Grant in New York, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, and residencies at Yaddo, The Djerassi Foundation and The Virginia Center for the Arts.

© Judith Raphael