Otis Tamasauskas

Otis Tamasauskas (born 1947) is a printmaker and educator.

Career Otis Tamasauskas was born in Tirschenreuth, Germany in a displaced persons camp in 1947, following his parents' escape from Lithuania when the Communists came to power. He emigrated with his family to Canada in 1952 to Niagara Falls and to Toronto in 1954. He was educated at Central Technical School, Toronto (1963–1967) and the University of Windsor, Ontario, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1974.

As a child, Tamasauskas was interested in Lithuanian folk art and traced Lithuanian symbols in books on Lithuanian folk art and design. "When I made my first print," he has written, "I knew this was it, it was what I wanted to do, in life…. the idea of being able to use a plate, or block; print it many times, side by side, sequential images provided a vicarious explanation of obsessive patterns that reoccur in Lithuanian folk art, and design, relating to my early visual experiences" (1998).

In making a print, as his colleague and friend, J. C. Heywood has said, he begins “by moving quite spontaneously on a litho stone with a vigorous, warm mark, then building his image layer by layer out of that initial impetus”. Heywood says Tamasauskas' way of working is close to the approach of Stanley William Hayter - causing the medium to develop the image out of its inner characteristics. With many of Tamasauskas' prints, only one is created, rather than a numbered edition. He has been called eccentric or at least, of working loosely with the medium in his way of printmaking by one art historian. Another writer has said that his amalgam gives a more complex effect, one related to psychological factors. Tamasauskas has praised the amalgam's printed surface as escaping traditional printmaking. In 1994, Otis moved to Gananoque, Ontario.