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We spend so much time worrying about the future.
What if, for just a moment, you imagined that life is all happening right now?
Even when it’s happening Right now, you are experiencing it in you mind.
You may be told that you are not being realistic, or that you need to think about tomorrow. The truth is, the only moment we really have is right now, this very moment when you are reading this. Look around you, hear the sounds, look at the colors, feel the temperature and breath… This is happening.
Tomorrow is a figment of your imagination, as is yesterday. Experience this moment now, change it if you don’t like it or milk it for all it’s worth if you do. Right now is your only guarantee so you might as well be here.
Just a thought.
Dear Awesome You,
It’s all about the journey. Eventually, we all have the same destination. I would much rather stop and smell the roses, than blindly Stomp through them to get to the end.
Love Rafi 
I believe that every home deserves a special custom-designed exhibition masterpiece. A conversation piece that will stop your guest in their tracks. A deep piece that has a fascinating story behind it that will promote an interesting evening for everyone involved. Art has that power especially if it is beautiful and interesting.
I love commission work because it pushes the envelope on what I already do. In the past commission work has taken me down paths of thought that I may not have thought of.
There are several things I consider when agreeing to do a commission.
Is it something I can emotionally get behind?
My paintings are emotional in nature so if it is a concept or design that doesn’t have some kind of emotional feeling the creative flow just wont work for me. I’ve had people approach me and ask if I’ll paint their yacht and not really have a story behind why. Just not my thing. On a different note, I don’t do pet portraits, but a woman approached me with a powerful story about her best friend who changed her life. It was her dog who had recently passed away and she wanted a reminder of him. I jumped on the opportunity to create something so beautiful and powerful.
Does the person love my work?
I have a very unique style and it is important to me that the person commissioning me to create something loves my previous work. I’ve had people who find out I’m an artist and ask me to do a commission without ever even looking at my art. I’ll usually tell them to look at my art and then get back to me. On the other hand I have people who love my pieces and will want something that already sold, I’ll usually ask what the piece meant to them and create a piece based on their response.
Is it empowering and makes me feel good in creating it?
Since I am an emotional painter, I am very aware of what I am feeling when creating a piece. Considering the amount of time I spend with each piece, I do not work on anything that is negative in nature. I had a gentleman ask me if I could create a piece of him with a gun to his head and have my splatter style coming from the other side of his head. I said no thanks. Yet I had someone ask for the four horses of the apocalypse, the concept was so cool that I jumped on it because of his empowering story of why he wanted them.
Is is super awesome?
If it meets all the criteria above and is something that I have never done before, but it excites me… I’m all over it.
It’s pretty easy, just contact me and we can discuss. You can contact me via email by clicking the button at the bottom of the page or call me at 815-342-9448. It’s painless and free. Once we discuss what you want, and we both agree that it is awesome, I’ll require a deposit of %50 to get started. Shipping cost will be the responsibility of the buyer.
It seems that as an artist you are given license to be out of your mind a bit. I enjoy this very much, because honestly I would much rather be out of my head than in it. In my opinion something important is lost when we try to act like adults, whatever that means. When you watch adorably happy children play adults they suddenly acted stressed and carry serious expressions on their cute faces. Once we get older and play adult, the serious face isn’t all that cute.
I think being weird has huge benefits. For the nature of this article I mean weird as in bizarre, fantastic, and uncanny. Like Klee dressing up like a character in Harry Potter for the book release kinda weird. I don’t mean anything negative… So Let’s get to it.
Reason Number one – Make The Mundane Interesting
You can dress up for a Harry Potter book release. Not a book signing by the way, not an opening for anything grand… Just a book store in a suburb. What makes this awesome is how you can turn something mundane, like waiting in line into an epic adventure. I remember having to wait in a line that was going to take a few hours to get through. I played a game of name that tune with people around me. I began by saying “Excuse me, I’ve got this song in my head and I can’t remember where it’s from, can you help me out?” Then I sang.
Reason Number dos – You Get To Be You
You don’t have to worry so much about reputation or what people think of you. I mean, c’mon you’re weird, you don’t have a reputation. This is the part I love most about being a weirdo. You basically get to be yourself, everyday, every moment and not try to follow some facade of normal that doesn’t actually exist.
Reason Number Three – You Get To Live In Excitement
You can get super excited about things that no one else thinks is exciting. I have to say, my wife is quite possibly the most awesome nerdy chick I have ever met in my entire life. She gets SO excited about things that no one else even thinks twice about. As you know, she designs beautiful jewelry for a living, what you may not know is how excited she gets about the stones, their history, how they were formed, how they were mined, cut, polished, and on and on. She gets really excited and doesn’t even care if no one else shares in her excitement… That’s awesome.
Reason Numbero Quatro – You Get To Go Against The Norm
No matter what is going on, even if the weather is bad, you stubbed your toe, and everyone around you is in a bad mood, you can act weird. This means that no matter what is going on in your life you get to smile and laugh as if every day is the best day ever. You get to interrupt patterns of behavior by hanging upside down from a tree to get a different perspective. Or walking backwards and rewinding the moment that just happened so you can experience it again or differently.
Reason Number Five – The More The Merrier
Like attracts like and when you are weird, you attract other weirdos to you that are your kind of weird. What a great way to live life, surrounded by others who are weird enough to be themselves, happy, easily excited and seem to make everything fun.
Have fun weirdos and I love you!
I remember being in class and being told to get my head out of the clouds and pay attention. This was usually followed by me pretending to pay attention and figuring out ways to day dream without anyone noticing. Of course, I also thought I was a bad kid or there was something seriously wrong with my ability to focus. I imagine if it happened today I would have been labeled with some kind of attention deficit disorder and given drugs or something to fix me.
Honestly, I was just bored. Not all the time, some of my teachers were fantastic at capturing my imagination and taking me on a fun learning adventure where I just soaked in every detail of the experience. Other teachers were bland and it was much more fun to venture into my mind than to listen to them yammer on about the boring text book.
Either way, I spent a lot of time developing the skill of purposefully creating pictures in my mind and playing out complex scenarios that involved slaying dragons and saving a damsel in distress.
I think everyone has the ability to create pictures and complex scenarios in their mind. Whether or not they are practiced at doing it on purpose is another question. I know people who walk around for days frustrated and angry because they create an entire story in their mind that is completely false. What’s worse, is they believe it actually happened.
I think this is really powerful, I mean think about the last time you flipped your lid because you thought something was going on that wasn’t actually going on. You felt all the emotions, all the anger, sadness and momentum as if it had actually happened right in front of you. Now imagine if you could use that power of emotion on purpose.
Even something as silly as imagining having your own brand of cola because you are super popular is better than thinking some of the lame thoughts you may be used to thinking. Have fun with it.
Instead of letting your thoughts run away with you, you can decide to think whatever you want to think… I mean, they’re your thoughts, you actually decide to entertain them or not. I think it just takes a little practice and consistency. Creating new habits of thought and connections in the brain actually doesn’t take to long, but consistency is key.
Just imagine how awesome it would be, to put your head in the clouds and let your imagination soar and take you wherever you want to go. I know that if you do this enough times, eventually your life catches up and a new story is told all around.
I spend a lot of time imagining myself on the cover of Time magazine with a headline that says, “One of the greatest artists of our generation.” It’s fun and feels pretty awesome.
We spend a lot of time in our head anyway, might as well think about stuff that makes you feel awesome. Because honestly, it doesn’t matter if it’s right in front of you or in your head, it all feels the same.
Just a thought… We’ve got no one telling us to get our head out of the clouds anymore, and if someone does, well that’s what the finger next to your ring finger is for.
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You may be wondering if your cold stark walls are starting to represent the shriveled hope that you once had of making your home interesting and inviting. Luckily, we here at Rafi Was Here Studios have decided to create awesome fine art prints, because your walls deserve it.
Armed with a laptop and comfy pink bunny slippers you can browse over 70 prints and find the perfect piece of Rafi Art for your home. We are also offering a size selection for the prints so you can get the size you want. Each art print is signed, dated and hugged lightly by the artist to ensure no creases.
Recently I finished a piece called “Contemplation.” It is a painting of a woman who is deep in thought and the magic of her intention is floating around her. As with most of my pieces, I stared at it for a very long time after it was finished and wondered what people would think of her.
This got me thinking about the different perceptions people have about art. Some people would think she was absolutely beautiful, others would just scoff at her and walk away. I wondered what kind of person would scoff at something beautiful and whether or not they were happy people.
It was then that I remembered that I was a very different person in the past. As much as I love art and am excited to see the uniquely awesome creations that people create, back then I was cynical and would scoff too. I can honestly say I wasn’t very happy, I pretty much complained and criticized everything.
This got me thinking about the weather. Yep, the weather. It’s been infuriatingly hot here in Pensacola and as much as I would love to stay inside and hibernate in air-conditioning, I have things I have to do outside.
I thought about people I know who don’t seem to be bothered by the heat and how much happier they seem during the summer months. I thought about hot days at the beach and how the weather isn’t really that big of a deal.
Perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses. So I played around with the idea of deleting the heat and focusing on the things I enjoyed. I focused intensely on the small breeze, the cold refreshing water, the sound of the fan running in the background, the birds tweeting and how good it felt to wipe the sweat from my skin. Slowly, I started to shift my perception to other awesome things, such as the feeling of walking into air-conditioning after being out in the heat or how the shade feels so good.
I realized that the things I perceive are not good or bad, that judgement comes a split second after I’ve experienced what ever it is. If I spend my entire time bitching about the heat, then all I’m doing is making myself miserable. Instead, I’ll delete the bitching, focus on the beauty and milk that as much as I can. It works wonders for me.
In the past I criticized everything and made myself miserable, guess it’s better to just focus on what you want to see. To see the beauty in a flower on a hot day, listen to the sound of birds chirping, the sound of thunder in the distance or admiring a unique piece of art and taking it all in with a smile. Sounds way more fun.
As I was driving to Blabtv the morning of my interview, I spilled coffee on my white shirt and it dawned on me that I wasn’t wearing pants.
Of course this is the way I was picturing my day going, I would arrive on the set of The Daily Brew and everyone would start laughing at my wardrobe malfunction.
Luckily, none of that happened. Klee and I arrived early and we were greeted warmly and professionally. Everyone went out of their way to make me feel welcome and comfortable. The host did an amazing job asking me questions and making me sound way more interesting than I actually am.
Watch my video with behind the scenes footage
Or click here to watch the full interview http://blabtv.com/thedailybrew/interview/artist-rafi-perez/
