Photos by Sasha Pedro

CFA Faculty

A Room with a View

Painter and teacher Richard Raiselis has made his career by seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary

Raiselis has occupied this studio since 1990 and has painted elements of that scene dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. He has also painted from offices and classrooms in 855 Comm Ave, dorm rooms in Warren Towers and Claflin Hall, and the roof of the School of Law. He spent a sabbatical year painting from a Questrom School of Business deck that overlooks Kenmore Square. He likes looking down at the city, preferably through a window.

In Warren Towers, Raiselis says, “I had a nice rectangular picture window—the frame was already built in.” Sometimes he holds up a yardstick at arm’s length to decide on the dimensions of a painting. Along one side of his studio, a collection of cloud paintings rest on shallow shelves. Some are as small as 4 x 4 inches. Leaning against the opposite wall is Independence Day, which measures 76 x 105 inches and shows Nickerson Field in the foreground and the Boston skyline in the distance. An expanse of clouds fills more than half of the canvas.

“The light here in Boston is sensational,” says Raiselis. “There’s something about the weather, the climate, and the city of Boston—which is brick red, blue sky, Fenway green—that makes a beautiful kind of tapestry, a beautiful quilt.”

Raiselis retired as an associate professor in June 2025, after 36 years at CFA. Before moving out of his studio, he spent the summer and fall organizing an exhibit for Boston University Art Galleries. Landscapes Near Me, a retrospective featuring Raiselis’ work spanning three decades, runs January 20 through March 6, 2026 at 808 Gallery. The reception for the exhibition is Thursday, February 12, 5-7pm. Both the reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.

Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

Much of Raiselis’ work can be divided neatly into categories and eras. There are the cloud studies he did in the early 2000s, his power lines from the 2010s, and trees from the 2020s. Urban landscapes and reflections have remained a focus for decades. A unifying trait across all of his work is the inspiration he finds in ordinary settings. Raiselis paraphrases 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to explain the challenge his subjects present: “The creative mind is capable of thinking something that no one else has thought before, while looking at something that everyone sees.”

Before coming to BU, Raiselis spent two years teaching in Italy. He didn’t set up an easel at the Vatican or the Colosseum. He painted from his apartment’s balcony or the terrace. “I thought if I were any good, I could make something good happen with rather ordinary places,” he says. “I think the ordinary is pretty extraordinary if you give it a few moments.”

Raiselis’ power line series perfectly encapsulates that sentiment. He came up with the idea while walking the family dog. “Coco would look down and I would look up,” he says. “I found the power lines around the house, especially at dusk, just really beautiful.” The paintings he made are as much about the sky as they are the crooked geometry of the poles and wires. Shades of blue and white-and-gray clouds mix to convey different types of weather and times of day.

More often, Raiselis has found beauty looking down from a high vantage rather than gazing up from ground level. Early in his time at BU, he got permission to spend a summer working in a Warren Towers dorm room, where he painted the view of Kenmore Square and beyond.

In 2006, with the help of an executive at a financial company, Raiselis got access to the unfinished floors of a building on State Street. He still remembers the first time he looked outside the window: “This VP said, ‘OK, Richard—close your eyes,’ and she raised the blinds. It was a reflection of Boston in a wobbly glass building that just blew me away.” He did this work off and on from 2006 through 2019 and created some of his favorite paintings.

From State Street and two other buildings, Raiselis produced landscapes of the city that stretch to the Boston Harbor Islands and kaleidoscopic paintings of the city reflecting off the facades of office buildings. Distorted urban landscapes and patchworks of color—the Boston reds, blues, and greens that he loves so much—look almost impressionistic. Criss-crossed by the lines dividing the window panes, they also take on the look of mosaics.

“That quilt of color is so intense when you’re high up,” Raiselis says. “It’s such a surprise. It’s such an unconventional way to look at the world.”

Grounded in the Basics

“There’s something about painting a landscape when all of the colors are working in the right way,” Raiselis says. “You get this dividend of not just an expression of the place, but an expression of the smell of the place, of the humidity of the place, of the wind, of the sound. And one can aspire to that. I think I do. It’s an elusive catch.”

In the classroom, one of Raiselis’ tenets was establishing the fundamentals, to prepare his students for the challenge of interpreting their subjects and seeing something that nobody else has seen.

Although he’s taught courses at every level, including drawing, painting, and a graduate seminar on the history of color, “I taught foundation painting probably more than any of those,” he says. In that course, he distilled the process to five elements: composition, drawing, color, technique, and subject. “I had a teacher who said there was no advanced painting because it all boils down to how those five areas are overlaid.” Teaching that lesson provided a valuable reminder to focus on the basics in his own work.

As he packs up the studio where he’s found inspiration for 36 years, he considers another tenet that’s helped him time and again: “I’ve always felt that I could find something wonderful to look at wherever I might be.”