2007-08 Visual Arts Competition Winner and Finalist Angel Otero
Angel Otero is a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute and an up-and-coming painter whose work offers rich brushwork, dynamic colors and unique imagery that reflects his experiences growing up in Puerto Rico. For two years, Angel has been a winner of the Civic & Arts Foundation’s Visual Arts Competition. Through this participation, Angel has exhibited at the Union League Club several times both solo and as part of groups. We asked Angel to discuss his experience as an artist and Civic & Arts winner.
When did you start creating art?
I started really young (maybe 10 or 12). There was a girl in my neighborhood that I liked and one day I was playing with her and she was making cartoon drawings and I could not believe she was doing it without tracing. I asked her to show me and from that day on, I kept going.
When did you decide to be a painter?
I started with cartoons and later worked up to painting family members. I begged my dad to take me to the Museo del Arte de Puerto Rico and finally he did. I saw this Arnaldo Roche Rabell painting there and I knew, right then, that I would be a painter. What’s really amazing is that the Rabell painting has since been transferred to the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago) so I can see it whenever I want to remember that original inspiration. After I saw it the first time, I applied to the Fine Arts program at the University of Puerto Rico, even though I had to hide it from my parents. When I told them I wanted to be an artist, they told me to be an architect. They didn’t know I applied for Fine Arts until they opened my acceptance letter. It was a big deal. Since then, though, things have evolved and painting is what I do best in my life.
How has your background influenced your work?
I work from memories of my childhood in Puerto Rico - such as my experiences climbing around the “barriadas” (also known as Ghettos or Favelas) with my friends, watching this type of community grow with ambition, courage, and best of all the creativity to live overcoming their limitations of poorness. These picturesque themes are dealt with as an excuse to lay paint down in a richly colorful, highly textural, abstract manner, allowing just enough cues, provoking the viewer to find the narrative in the puzzle of paint. I create paint structures that balance the subject of these places and my ambition to paint as a medium itself, overlaying with paint the facts of my own limitations within painting. With paint, I want to give a sense of abundance, unbalance, ambition, courage and persistence within form, color and texture in every painting.
How did winning the C&A competition affect you?
My family cannot support me in an economic way. They’ve supported me in emotional ways which has been more important for me, but it has been up to me to buy paints and to see if I was able to do it. That is why the Civic and Arts award helped me like crazy, especially because it is four times more expensive to live here than where I am from. But what it did most is that it showed support from people who really believe that what I am doing is good. It made me want to be more focused and ambitious about exploring other medias.
