Victor Raphael | Orb VI (1984)
As a child growing up in the burgeoning Space Age, Victor Raphael, like thousands of other children, dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Eventually realizing that the odds of this happening were against him, he focused his attention on exploring and interpreting the cosmos through his art.
Raphael has created a unique body of work that combines art and technology. By merging traditional media such as painting, photography and printmaking with modern digital media, he creates complex and alluring images that expand conventional views of time and space.
The core of Raphael's art consists of modified Polaroids. He begins by taking Polaroid photographs of objects with grand, universal significance--running the gamut from NASA photographs from the Cosmos broadcast on TV to historic works of art found in the world's great museums. He then paints and applies gold and metal leaf directly to them to highlight or obscure specific features. In this he transforms the original imagery.