A New Mexico veteran art series
Disabled veteran artists, in their own words.
Rafael Gonzales — Vietnam veteran, Army Staff Sergeant, and blind New Mexican painter — sits down with fellow disabled vets across New Mexico to talk about the art that helps them carry what they carry.
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About Rafael
Rafael Gonzales is a painter, a teacher, and a Vietnam veteran from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Drafted out of Rio Grande High School, he trained in multi-channel communications, served in Germany, and landed in Vietnam in 1970 as a sergeant with a radio-relay signal company supporting the 4th Infantry Division — flying mail and equipment by helicopter to mountain outposts, and doing a fair amount of listening along the way. A night attack there took most of the sight in one eye and started a condition the Army doctors said would slowly take the rest.
It did. Across twelve years of service, a family, and jobs he could not hold because he could not see them, Rafael went from partial sight to legally blind. He earned a fine-arts degree from the College of Santa Fe in three years, learned to live blind at a VA rehabilitation center, and led his local chapter of the Blinded Veterans Association.
Through all of it, the work held. "I always talk about how important art is, and how it actually helps you recuperate from trauma of any sort," he says. "That is what has really gotten me through all these years." His paintings — pieces like Flashbacks, After the War, and Men of Valor — hang in the museum at the Albuquerque Veterans Memorial, where he still volunteers.
Broken Eyes Studio is his next canvas: sitting down with other New Mexico veterans who live with disability and make art, one honest conversation at a time.
