"My mother was a farmer's daughter from the tip of Long Island. As a family, we lived in Brooklyn. It was WWII and we had a victory garden and flowers in the backyard. The garden meant something very deep to my mother. I helped her with it. More than anything else, my own experience of the nature realm was influenced and inspired by my mother and that garden amidst its plants and cherry tree. I, now 6 decades later, paint cherry tree blossoms and my garden here in France. The Brooklyn garden is where I first witnessed the patterns of seasons, the dormant times, the flourishing times. I think nature's alchemy really affected me from those beginning garden times. I see alchemy and magic in the sense of the wonder of watching buds come out of the earth. They weren't there yesterday, but here they are today. Seeing blossoms come alive is the same as watching a painting come forth out of the white space of a page or a canvas. The garden is another example of how one begins with nothing but seeds and the brown colored space of the earth, from which, little by little, the garden emerges. Another gift my parents gave me were our summers on Long Island Sound in Peconic, N.Y. Our house was a stone's throw away from the beach, where I could at an early age, all by myself, watch the water and the sky's reflections on the water's surface. My water paintings grew out of those soul-strengthening moments." -Joseph Raffael