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  • JUDY WOODRUFF: Artist Angel Otero's brand of visual storytelling is a unique one.

  • He pours paint onto glass and then peels it off in sheets once it dries.

  • Tonight, Otero gives his Brief But Spectacular take on that process and how his roots help

  • shape his work.

  • It's also part of our Canvas series.

  • ANGEL OTERO, Artist: My name is Angel Otero.

  • I grew up in the island of Puerto Rico, very working-class, middle-class family.

  • My father was very pushy with the idea that I could follow his steps of being an insurance

  • agent.

  • And I did.

  • I was a horrible salesman.

  • I kept dreaming about being an artist, a painter.

  • So I quit the job.

  • On a Saturday morning, I remember telling him, like, hey, this school called the School

  • of the Art Institute of Chicago saw my artwork.

  • They offered me a scholarship to start studying painting.

  • At a young age, I came across a book by Jackson Pollock.

  • What I had learned as a child was that art has to be something that you recognize, that

  • tells a story, all these things.

  • And looking at images of this work felt very liberating and felt that they were paintings

  • made with the idea of just the movement of painting and, you know, the physical part

  • of it.

  • Then, when making art in Chicago, I didn't know how to find my own voice.

  • I had around my studio a big pile or a big mountain of dry oil paint that I didn't want

  • to throw away.

  • I decided that I wanted to collage it on the canvas.

  • Most of the professors were kind of laughing at the ideas or think that I was coming up

  • with saying that my paintings are about the warmth of Puerto Rico, about the Caribbean

  • colors.

  • That was when I started going back to those memories of growing up with my grandmother.

  • And from there, I departed with the idea of composing all this imagery, collaging dry

  • oil paint.

  • I started having quite a good response to it.

  • I started painting small pieces of glasses with different colors, scraping the paint

  • off that glass, using those new skins to make new works.

  • Some of those old stains of old colors that were in the glass were reflecting themselves

  • on the new skins almost like print.

  • I said, whoa, wait a minute, I can make a painting on a glass, and it can be figurative

  • or abstract, and, eventually, I can paint another thing on top of it.

  • The blurriness of how things change as our life changes over time is very interesting

  • to me.

  • My grandmother passed away four years ago.

  • I know she would still not understand at all nothing of what I do, but it would have been

  • very amazing to see her face or her thoughts about many of the works.

  • My name is Angel Otero, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on my body of work.

  • JUDY WOODRUFF: Very sweet.

  • And you can find additional Brief But Spectacular episodes on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Artist Angel Otero's brand of visual storytelling is a unique one.

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