Emanuel Raftoplouos was born in Suez, the multicultural seaport city in north-west Egypt. His mother, who had Italian heritage spoke to him in Italian, while his father, whose heritage was Greek, spoke in Greek. He was educated at the British school which gave him an easy command of English. It was here that he was introduced to painting and drawing.
In 1956, in the lead up to the Suez crisis, his family made the prudent decision to leave Egypt and emigrate to Australia, where they settled in Sydney. Although he wanted to study art, his father wished for him to have a profession. The compromise was that he enrol in architecture at the University of Sydney. However Raft, as he had renamed himself, surreptitiously enrolled in painting classes at Bissieta’s art school. Architecture was soon abandoned.
In 1959 he sailed for Milan, where he studied at the Brere Academy, where Bissietta had also studied. Here he was joined by Philipa Watkins, who he had met as a fellow art student in Sydney. Together they travelled to London, the standard destination for young Australians visiting Europe.
Raft began to exhibit paintings burnt and seared with a blow-torch, as well as elaborate jewellery, which he called “wearable sculpture”. These were well received in both Australia and England.
In 1968 two of his paintings were selected for the National Gallery of Victoria’s landmark The Field exhibition. The following year his marriage to Watkins ended.
In 1978, three years after his second marriage to the designer Helen Thaw, Raft and his family settled permanently in Sydney. Although he had a successful career in England, teaching as well as making art, he missed the sun. He joked “the rising damp was too much for me”.
In 1981 he was appointed lecturer in art at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education, a position he held until his retirement in 1996 as it transformed into the City Art Institute and the College of Fine Arts, UNSW.
He bought a house in the country near Lot, in France, where he stayed in the European summers. After Helen died in 2008 there was less travel.
His third wife, the sculptor and jeweller Sylvia Ross, was a long time colleague at the College of Fine Arts.
In 2015 as the National Gallery of Victoria prepared to revisit The Field for its 50th year celebration, the curators discovered that several works were missing. Raft’s two Monoliths”, in the collection of Kym Bonython, had been destroyed some years before in Adelaide’s Black Thursday bushfires. He agreed to recreate them. As Raft was weakened by leukaemia the works were completed with the assistance of fellow artist and former student David Eastwood.
- Writers:
-
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 2022
- Last updated:
- 2022
