Featured Prints Artist: Samuel Philip Raffa

Speciality: Paintings & Pencil Drawings / Contact: raffagraphics[at]yahoo[dot]com

This time we had the pleasure of going on a journey through the artistic life and mind of Samuel Philip Raffa, who goes by the nickname `sphilr in this green rabbit hole that is deviantART. Having had a lively imagination from early on, Sam found a way to keep it under control capturing his emotional struggles and joys in life. His skillfully mastered surreal drawings and paintings are full of vivid colors, amazing little details and mind blowing symbolism, perfectly blended together via his chosen artistic tools of the trade.



Who's the artist and person behind the sinister sounding nickname 'Sphilr'?

It does have this peculiar whispery quality to it, don'cha think? But it's just my name, kind of anagrammed - S. Phil. R.


What sucked you into the world of the surreal arts?

I think you could probably blame it on the Catholic church; we're told some colorful stories early on, and they tend to leave a mark... crazy dream imagery; symbolism. And I was a kid who had the sort of imagination it takes a lot of years to grow into; drawing, from an early age, helped to keep that imagination under some kind of control.

I was freelance illustrating from the time I was 17 until, all at once, at the age of 30, I'd had enough of commercial art, and I sat down to do the first painting I'd done for myself after many years of trying to pay the rent with it, and it just came pouring out of me - it had been a traumatic year, and there was a kind of over-wattage - too much emotion to process in any normal way, and I found that the painting could contain all of that. It was very much like dreaming awake, and it gave me an odd perspective about the nasty times I'd just lived through, made me recognize that I didn't have to be trapped by those circumstances. That painting was "Gardening At Night". I painted myself more or less sane, and I've been doing that ever since.

"I was a kid who had the sort of imagination it takes a lot of years to grow into."




How did you acquire your artistic skills?

I'm mostly self-taught - I've been drawing since I was really little. I did go to art school when I was 21, but the school was in a transition stage between teaching people art and teaching people to be businessmen - commercial artists. I had a teacher who taught me some great things in terms of technique for graphite pencil, but otherwise I've taught myself, through trial and error.

The best thing about going to art school - by far - was just meeting a bunch of other art students - it was one of the all-time high points of my life, those years at school. My first year on deviantART felt like that, too, in a lot of ways.


What are your chosen mediums and tools of the trade?

I love pencils. I'm fond of brushes; but when I was 21, I became completely obsessed with the airbrush; I just could not get enough of it. I've screwed around with a lot of different tools over the years, but the airbrush took the longest for me to get comfortable with, and I still have this nearly sick relationship with it - loco amore. I use a Paasche VL with multiple heads and a Paasche AB airbrush. I painted with gouache for 19 years, switched to oils over the past 6 years, and I just purchased my first set of acrylics - I don't even know what I'm going to paint with them yet. I gained a lot artistically by making myself uncomfortable with oils, but the damned stuff takes too long to dry, so I want to see if maybe the acrylics can offer the best qualities of both mediums - we'll see.


Some of your artworks have a musical flow to them or are directly inspired by music. What is your relationship to music in general and in regards to your art?

Music just towers over everything for me - My sister and I both suffer from this odd condition where, if we're not actually listening to music at home or on portable equipment, we're continually thinking a song, different songs, at all hours of the day, even in our dreams... We started asking people about this when we were in our 20s, if they had this mental soundtrack going 24-7, and it turns out to be kind of a rare mutation. It informs every minute of my day, and it becomes a very intense communion when I'm painting and drawing. I listened to The Catherine Wheel's "Strange Fruit" so often while painting "Paradox" that I nearly named it that.




When you feel the need for inspiration, where do you turn?

I used to strictly pull from things that were going on in my own life, or in my own dreams, but I fell in love with the girl in the painting "Paradox", and it totally changed the experience of painting for me, for the better. Ever since then, my inspiration comes from people I admire, or I'm fascinated by - so the paintings end up being about specific things in their lives, and also my feelings about them.

I'm right now working on a pencil drawing that features two deviants as models, and I'm finishing an oil painting of a third deviant - this web site has taken over my life completely... But that's made painting more of an outward, learning thing - a rejuvenating thing - than the kind of psychological purging it used to be. I'm crazy about painting that way; I wish I had more time to do it, though.




How do you choose the medium and tools before you start a new painting or drawing?

Pencils are for the images I'm very close to; I can see the entire image in my head to begin with, and the pencil just kind of lets me take dictation from that mental image. Paintings, airbrush in particular, tend to be about the images that begin sort of amorphously - I have a vague idea of what it looks like, and painting it allows me to swim towards it gradually, until I finally do see the specifics of it, as a result of painting myself there. Painting is always a discovery process, for me.


How does spirituality inspire and influence your art?

I do consider painting and drawing to be, primarily, spiritual activities. You have to be interested in the truth, for one thing, you have to gather yourself and lose yourself to the truth, as you see it. One minute, you're just trying to focus, trying to see clearly, and the next you've crossed some simple boundary where time doesn't measure in the normal way, and you blink your eyes and realize that the whole day's gone by.

One of the most tricky paintings I've ever sat down to was my first oil painting, "Hanein", because it involved something terrible that had happened to a close friend of mine before we'd ever met, and when she finally had the courage to tell me about it, my admiration for her doubled, but I also found myself with this calm willingness to murder the people who'd been responsible. I'd been angry before, but this was different from that - this was the kind of genuine malice and forethought that puts people's lives at stake. I walked around with that for awhile and I didn't really know what was going to happen with it, and one day I was drawing her, and this image dropped into my head that just made me sob and cry... I tried drawing it small, so that I could sort of get it over with quickly, but it wasn't there, I couldn't find the totality of it that way. So it became this huge painting whose elements grew over time, and the real resolution of it, and my acquittal with the rage I'd found in myself, didn't happen until I'd been working on that one painting for years; it was the roses, growing in the same shape as the child in the moon... Just an obscure detail to anyone looking at it, but I'd found a metaphor, or a dream image, that resonated with me, and it made me feel like the real ending of that story might not be entirely evident to me; that this life has all sorts of things going on above and below it continually, and all rage can do is blind you to everything but the stuff that's the most apparent to you - often the least appealing part of life.
How's that for crazy?

"You have to be interested in the truth, for one thing, you have to gather yourself and lose yourself to the truth, as you see it."




How long can it take for a piece of yours to be finished? Feel free to pick a particular work as an example.

I take forever to do a painting... "Gardening At Night" took 3 months; "Paradox" took 6 months, "Diapason" ended up taking six YEARS - but I was learning oils, for one thing, and I'd abandoned it repeatedly, for months on end. It's a fact that, if I hadn't found deviantART when I did, I never would've finished that painting. No doubt about it.



At what point do you consider a work to be finished? How do you know it, when do you feel it?

For me, there's a sense of noise - a cacophony when you look at the thing in its unfinished stages; I know it's finished when it looks like silence, to me. Absolute quiet.


The various traditional arts are the most ancient, having their roots in the stone age. Being a traditional artist through and through, what are your feelings about digital art mediums and utilizing them?

The first digital art I was ever moved by was by a fellah named Jon Bonath, at Pirate Gallery in about 1994. He'd taken some of what Jerry Uelsmann and Bob Carlos Clarke had done with darkroom techniques in photomanipulation and kind of pulled them into a more painterly realm with photo editing software, probably Photoshop. So I knew it could be done - digital art that really was ART. But it wasn't until I started looking at stuff on deviantART in 2004 that I found people who could do that and bring it right up to the same realm as the paintings I'd grown up worshiping...

I have a dilettant's fondness for Photoshop, and I'll cobble together some images for journal illustrations here and there, but I know artists on deviantART who are virtuosos of the Wacom graphics tablet to the same extent that any great artist who's found their tool of choice is able to compose what's unique about their own vision best in that particular way. And that's resulted in digital work that's literally knocked the wind out of me, right here on this site.




What actually brought you and your work into the online world?

Screwing around at work; surfing the 'net when I shouldn't have been. Down the big, green rabbit hole I went, pal. deviantART swallowed me whole.


Real art is a constant process. What keeps your artistic juices flowing?

That over-wattage thing never does go away. I think artists in general just have more of an extreme, comprehensive reaction to the world they live in than most people do - too much emotion, too much response to all the stimuli, to process in only the normal, socially acceptable ways. We do this art thing, or we burst into flames, or something.

"We do this art thing, or we burst into flames."


deviantART is the largest online art community. Do you believe the online art movement has had a lasting positive or negative effect?

Anything that democratizes art is a good thing; coffee shops that hang art, comic books - I never would've started painting if I hadn't seen comics. I know deviants who can chart the real beginnings of their lives as creative beings on this very website, and dA's had a huge effect on me.
Beyond deviantART, it's also nice to be able to come across something as rare as the Abdul Mati Klarwein book I snagged on eBay two weeks ago...




Do you showcase your works in "real-world" art galleries or similar places?

I used to - those oil paintings were commissioned by a gallery called LeJardin that went out of business long before I'd finished the damned things. I might start doing that again, but I'm not in any hurry to.


Are there any persons in the art world you look up to? Did someone change your views on art and creating it in a significant way?

Sure, yeah... When I was a kid, it was Salvador Dali and Neal Adams; when I was 17 I came across Abdul Mati Klarwein's paintings and my jaw just hit the floor; that was the high water mark, where I wanted to try and climb to. Remedios Varo, Jia Lu, Shang Ding; more recently `kolaboy and *BlueBlack.


What other artistic or non-artistic activities do you enjoy?

I'm a fool for restaurants; it got to be so bad that I ended up getting a restaurant booth in my place as partial payment for a freelance job...


What role(s) do you think do art and artists play in today's societies?

I think a lot of the time we're there to make underlying psychological forces evident and visible; and to remind people's hearts about both the simple joys of living and also the torments of being alive - I think both of those approaches have great value for the human heart...
Art probably serves the same purpose to society as REM (rapid eye movement) sleep does for a single organism - it keeps a society sane and searching in the same way that dreams do.

"It keeps a society sane and searching in the same way that dreams do."


What's your current profession? Is it related to art?

I'm one of four graphic designers working for the State of Colorado... I've been there for 10 years all of a sudden, but only full-time for the past year. I think about quitting the job at least once a week, but it really is a good job... I wish I could do it part-time. It takes up way too much of my day, all things considered.




What do you wish the future hold for you, art-wise and in general?

Well, my life has been a series of high flights and hard landings, and then recovering from the crash with the help of my artwork... I found deviantART somewhere in the course of one of those periods of healing that really went into some extra innings; in a lot of ways, dA took the place of my disastrous social life for a long time there...
I'd like to get to the point where the things that are important to me could be in some sensible balance, where I could see to all of them, and feel like I'm making full contact with my actual priorities, instead of this feeling of simply enduring long periods of bad circumstances with the help of the good things underlying them.




Do you have any last words of advise for our readers and fellow artists?

What comes immediately to mind is something that Gilda Radner said about the original Saturday Night Live; she said that what made the show something special was the fact that what they were doing was sharing secrets; telling the truth about things that most people have an instinct to hide from... I think that deviantART works the same way; you go into a great gallery and what you're looking at is that artist's secrets; their most intimate grapplings with life, and their best attempts at articulating them. That's a fairly sacred thing, I think, and something that can serve to renew everyone's vision, from the weariest-eyed professional to the greenest newcomer.

So, I guess the advice would just be that, since most of us don't have as much time to spend doing art as we'd like, make sure the time you spend doing it is spent telling your own particular, peculiar truth. Make your secrets known in your art - let it reflect your own unique spiritual, emotional, and intellectual DNA. The art that ends up nourishing the human spirit in a lasting way tends to come from the loneliest places in the human heart; don't be afraid to pull directly from that source.

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Previous Interviews

Zhang Jingna - Maureen Winter - Christian Hecker - Amelia Stoner - Kevin Rolly - George B. Smith III. - Stanley Lau - Marion Herrmann - Nykolai Aleksander - Anne-Julie Aubry - Justin Maller - Daniel Conway - Bobby Haynes - Tegan Coddington - Directors Cut - Dan Meyer - Bradley W Schenk - Jason Engle - Tom Wilcox - Phillip Prescott - Stephanie Dodson - Rick Pirman - Joseph Arruda - Tobias Zeising - Nicholas Rougex - Lia Saile