Broken EyesStudio

Selected work

Gallery

Work by Rafael Gonzales. Every piece includes a written description, so the work is available to everyone — sighted or not.

Rafael Gonzales at his easel in his studio, holding a piece of charcoal beside a charcoal drawing of a long-haired cat.
Rafael at work in his studio.
  • A densely textured oil painting laid on with a palette knife, broken into overlapping panels like fragments of memory. At the center is a large pale face with dark hollow eyes. Around it are pieces of Vietnam: an aircraft silhouette against a red sky, gold and olive hillsides, turquoise water with a gray boat, and small ghostly figures in the dark lower corner.

    Flashbacks

    Oil on canvas, palette knife

    Painted while Rafael was working through flashbacks and nightmares — each one put on the canvas as it came, until the piece became a collage of everything about Vietnam. When the painting was finished, the nightmares stopped. On permanent exhibit at the Albuquerque Veterans Memorial.

  • A life-cast bust of Rafael Gonzales displayed in a wooden case against an American flag. A green field bandage is wrapped across his eyes, his head is tilted back, and he wears an open shirt painted in camouflage blues and greens over a bare chest, with military dog tags around his neck. A brass plaque below reads: After the War.

    After the War

    Life-cast self-portrait, Hydrocal

    A life cast Rafael made of himself in a casting class. Months later, as his retinas tore and his sight went, he looked at the white figure looking back at him and turned it into the story of losing his eyesight — the eyes bound, a plaster shirt, dog tags, a flag. On permanent exhibit at the Albuquerque Veterans Memorial.

  • A painting of a U.S. Army helicopter burning in tall grass, flames and smoke streaming from it. In the foreground, figures lie low in the grass, one in a medic's helmet marked with a red cross. Shadowy shapes move among the trees in the dark background. In the upper right, the face of a soldier in a helmet rises above the scene like a spirit.

    Men of Valor

    Painted in memory of a close friend and Medal of Honor recipient — a medic thrown from a downed helicopter who broke his hip, went back for the pilots, and kept them alive until rescue. The shadows behind the trees are the enemy; the face above is, in Rafael's words, for all of us that were there at the time. On permanent exhibit at the Albuquerque Veterans Memorial.