best known simply as Rafi, is a balance of his two great passions — artistic landscaping and painting images of nature. He spends his days entwining the fragrances and colors to create beautiful gardens or capturing on his canvass the movements and moments that are not apparent to the untrained eye.

Nature’s troubadour, Rafi Vasquez has sung to Puerto Plata with the brushstrokes of his watercolors, leaving the indelible mark that binds him to Puerto Plata and Puerto Plata to him. On the subject of his hometown, he has painted “everything – its people, its Victorian houses, its fort, its ocean, its sea grapes, and its beaches Playa Dorada, Costambar, Cofresi” – the milieu in which he grew up.

His art celebrates nature, molding landscapes and national images, nuances that would otherwise go unnoticed. Through his paintings, he seeks to help people to see. “People look but they do not see,” he explains. “One has to frame the scenes for them to see.”

Rafi highlights the country’s four distinct seasons, even though most people do not observe them. He explains how the mahogany trees shed their leaves and how their trunks become invisible at night because of how dark the green leaves become in winter. “The way we perceive green changes in the night,” he says. “In summer, the natural light makes the leaves appear translucent.”

“The skies are ever-changing; once you know how they behave and you begin to understand the clouds, then you can fantasize as you like,” he offers in defense of the fact that there is a difference in the light, in the clouds, in the nights. “The light in January descends upon the Isabel de Torres Mountain. Beautiful, beautiful.”

The aspect of Rafi as a painter of living nature is synonymous with Puerto Plata. He describes himself as a “palmologist” and his unmistakable seals are the tall and elegant palm trees that frame Puerto Plata, especially along the highway as it nears Cofresi. It is sometimes possible to pinpoint the exact spot where the artist took the mental photograph to be preserved in a painting for posterity. Precise natural scenes make an impression on him that he wants to remember, and because of this he renders tribute to them in watercolors or oil paintings.

Rafi has a gift for capturing the air and the sea with such skill that those viewing his art feel the touch of the wind and the salt spray on their skin. One of his most recent works is that of a turbulent sea, as he viewed it when Tropical Storm Jeanne caught him working on the landscaping of a large garden of a house that fronts the Caribbean Sea in La Romana.

As one of the most highly-credited landscape artists of the Dominican Republic, Rafi confesses that he has worked on only a few gardens in Puerto Plata, perhaps because he first earned his recognition in the minds of his fellow townspeople for his talent as a painter. Rafi, as the prodigy student of the master of Puerto Plata artists, Rafael Arzeno, held his first exhibition at the age of 10.

He recalls his childhood vividly.

“Every day I would go to the farm. My father would teach me to ap- preciate nature. He would take me out to the patio to plant a seed and reflect on the lessons that planting a tree can teach. I would prefer to paint the river and the cow instead of caring for the animals. As such, walking on the beach of Bergantin to the west of Playa Dorada, I would return home with new watercolor paintings.”

Opposite Page:
Munoz Pathway/Acrylic over canvas