Portrait of a mentally ill man israeli artists painters arts Drawing by Raphael Perez

Raphael perez Hebrew name rafi peretz was born into a traditional family and grew up in Jerusalem.

 Family biography Raphael Perez father, Shimon Perez, worked as a receptionist at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem. His great love was art, but as a breadwinner, he could not fulfill his dream of becoming an artist. Raphael’s mother,  Alice Aliza Perez, worked as an assistant to a kindergarten teacher and later took care of a baby at home. She loved gardening and nature, and together with her husband, created a magnificent garden.

Raphael has several siblings. His elder brother David Perez repented in his mid-twenties and brought many people back to repentance. His sister Hana Peretz raised eight children and worked in the field of education. His brother Avi (Abraham) Peretz studied Philosophy and Judaism in Israel before moving to the United States where he completed his master’s degree in education and became a conservative rabbi. His fourth brother is Asher Peretz, who is very fond of traveling and has been to magical places all over the world. Raphael is the fifth sibling and has a twin brother named Miki (Michael) Peretz, who is a talented industrial designer. The youngest sibling is Shlomit Peretz, who has been involved in the Bezeq telephone company for almost three decades.

 Peretz). In the IDF, he served in the Artillery Corps. He worked for 15 years in education in therapeutic settings for children and taught art and movement.
Peretz is a graduate of the Center for Visual Arts in Be'er Sheva, where he studied from 1989-1992. He has been painting since 1989 and since 1999 earns a living only from selling art. Since 1995 he has lived and worked from his studio in Tel Aviv.
Between the ages of 17 and 32, he wrote about forty diaries, sketchbooks and artist books in which he wrote daily and described his thoughts, experiences and feelings and his struggle with his homosexual sexual orientations. He later adorned the diaries with illustrations and drawings. The diaries were presented in a solo exhibition at Camera Obscura and in a group exhibition at the Sommer Gallery.
In his work, starting in 1995, he dealt with relationships, initially with relationships between men and women, in which complex relationships between men and women can be seen. In addition to explicit paintings, he created series of flower paintings, as a metaphor for the relationship between a man and a woman.
At the age of 32 he came out of the closet and began to draw relationships between men. At first, the paintings express hesitation and imperfection, while Peretz does not reveal the faces of the cartoonists. After his first love for a man in 1999 and coming to terms with his sexual orientation, the paintings became peaceful and he presented the homosexual relationship in an ideal way. Peretz has created a series of naive paintings that deal with loving relationships between men and common daily activities in the home environment. Over the years he painted his mates.

• Nationality: ISRAEL
• Date of birth : 1965
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Israeli Artists