Rafael "Rafa" Sola

Mastery of traditional brush-based lettering and enamel finishing: hand-mixed pigments, precise brush control for crisp serif and script forms, enamel layering and curing for longevity, and repair/repurposing techniques for weathered surfaces. This skill underpins Rafa’s dual practice as a utilitarian sign painter and public artist—ensuring legibility, material durability, and the ability to inscribe community memory onto reclaimed storefronts and surfaces. It also informs his teaching in weekend workshops and his advocacy for informal labor practices.

Mastery of brush-based lettering and enamel finishing for durable public signage: hand-mixing pigments and enamels, precise brush control on irregular reclaimed surfaces, and techniques for weather-resistant strokes and gilding. This skill anchors Rafa's practice—ensuring legible commercial signs that double as communal memory and teaching material in his workshops for youth and informal workers.

Mastery of traditional hand-lettered sign painting and enamel finishing — mixing durable enamels, controlling flat brushes for crisp serifs and strokes, aging and restoring salvaged signage, and selecting palettes that weather gracefully. This skill is both a craft and a livelihood for Rafael Sola (he/him): it allows him to translate urban typographies into legible, long-lasting public assets, to repair and repurpose found materials, and to teach others brush technique and basic typography in community workshops.

Mastery of traditional hand-lettering with enamel paints on reclaimed substrates, optimized for legibility and long-term durability in harsh port-side conditions. Combines brush control, custom-mixed pigments, enamel finishing, and surface preparation for corrugated metal, wood, and tiled storefronts. This skill is central to Rafa's practice: it transforms utilitarian signage into community archives, preserves anonymous labor histories, and enables income through commercial commissions while grounding his social-practice workshops.

A field method for consolidating friable enamel edges while preserving brush texture and ensuring future reversibility; combines low-impregnation enamel consolidants, targeted application with fine sable brushes, and temporary tissue facings.

Practical ability to capture high-overlap, oblique photographic datasets for textured 3D models of enamel signs: arranging scale bars, controlling diffuse lighting, and producing archive-ready meshes to record brushwork and surface relief for conservation and community archive use.

A long, narrow, ground-floor storefront on the port edge that Rafa (he/him) and a loose community of neighbors converted into a living-workspace and public workshop. The space stores his hand-mixed enamels in reclaimed tins, a battered enamel-mixing bench once owned by his mentor Amira Duarte, racks

A battered steel toolbox—patched, sanded, and repainted so many times that its original color is a ghost beneath brushstrokes of cadmium red, deep turquoise, and enamel drips. Inside are hand-mixed enamel tins labeled in Amira Duarte's slanted hand, a dozen hog-hair brushes of differing nibs (two of

La Lonja is the derelict storefront Rafa converted into a combined living-workspace, toolroom, and free weekend workshop for neighbors and former street youth. Rafael Sola (he/him), born 1993-04-12, acquired the space by negotiated squatting and community stewardship in 2015 and has maintained it as

A salvaged pine board fitted with shallow wells stained by years of pigment and solvent; tucked into its folds are battered enamel tins, a hand-carved wooden stirrer, small glass vials of linseed and turpentine, and three recipes for enamel shades written in Amira Duarte's looping hand. Amira lent (

A weathered wooden case that holds three veteran hog-bristle brushes of different widths, several half-used tins of hand-mixed enamel in muted retro palettes, a dented metal mixing pestle, a stained wooden palette, a roll of frayed masking tape, and a grease-pencil notebook of Amira Duarte's recipes

A compact, decommissioned ferry ticket kiosk on Muelle 7 repurposed as a micro-studio and community noticeboard. Equipped for short-term enamel work, ventilation for enamel glazes, and a front-facing roll-down for painted panels and vendor postings; intended as a shared touchpoint between sign work and neighborhood coordination.

A handwritten 1929 mixing note found folded behind a salvaged enamel plate at Dique Tres. Describes a salt-resistant binder using local seaside clay, a specific fish-oil modifier, and a small proportion of ground lime; annotated with practical timings for kilnless curing. Offers a historically situated technique for weatherproofing enamel in maritime climates, useful for restoration and new coastal signage.

Digitized audio recordings of Rafa's mixing and technical narration, high-resolution scans of the Dique Tres salt-cure pages and selected entries from El Libro Térmico, a catalog entry in the municipal Coastal Memory Archive, and a community hard-drive copy deposited at La Lonja for workshop access.