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Rafael (Oleg) Beltramo - Jewish painter, sofer stam.

 

Painter, draftsman, pastelist. He has lived and worked in Turin since 2019.

 

 Born in Lipetsk in Russia in 1988.

He began attending drawing school at the age of 11. In 2006 he moved to Moscow to attend the VGIK (State Film University, specialization: artistic drawing), which ended in 2013. Among his teachers there are well-known names such as V. Braginkiy, A. Dudin, V. Arhipov and A. Tolkachev.

His final dissertation based on the short story Chekhov's "Mezzanine House" was well received in academia.

From 2015 to 2018 he taught artistic drawing at the “St. Petersburg” television school in Moscow.

Since 2015 Rafael has been a member of the Union of Russian Painters and still actively participates in exhibitions. His works are characterized by high quality, harmonic composition and a poetic-artistic note.

Rafael draws mainly with pastels and oil colors, painting above all landscapes, while a fundamental role in his artistic repertoire is given by the portraits that highlight the individuality of the subject represented.

The painter's works have been published in the periodicals Iskusstvo segodnja and Ars-Longa. His paintings are currently exhibited in state museums (muzej kvartira imeni Cechov from Moscow and istoriko hudohestvenny muzei from Moscow) and private collections located in Russia, Israel and Italy.

From 2018 to 2019 he studied to become a sofer at the Moscow Choral Synagogue under the guidance of the head of the Sofrut center, Rabbi Arie Zilbershtein. After finishing his studies he started working as a sofer stam and writing Sifrei Torah.

During the same period he attended kolel "Birkat Izhak" and was a student of the head of the kolel, Rabbi Ben Zion Melamed.

   

Rafael currently lives in Turin, Italy.