From collection Member List
Rosemary Otto, Beta Tau, University of Florida, was born in Aschendorf, Germany, in 1938 to an American mother and German father, then eight years later her family moved to Lake Worth, Florida. Her mother, who taught art at the local high school, gave Rosemary a box of crayons that inspired her creativity and sparked a lifelong devotion to art.
She studied at a variety of schools, including the University of Florida, where she was initiated into Beta Tau Chapter. During this time, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her art helped her cope with her mental illness and provided a means for creative expression of her inner life.
Her work includes etchings, oil paintings, collages, and watercolors. Drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as American folk landscape and German allegorical paintings, her work frequently depicts fantastical animals and people populating surrealist landscapes of trees under aqua skies. One writer describes her paintings as “a bit of Henry Darger… , a bit of Chagall, a bit of Jacob Lawrence, a smidgeon of Grandma Moses. It is a primitive approach, seemingly naive, almost outsider in style, but when all is said and done, it is pure Rosemary.”
Some critics have appreciated a nostalgic quality in her work, where “her imagination takes us to where we all wish we could escape to in a perfect childhood. “People say I have a good imagination,” Rosemary said in a rare interview, “but this artwork seems to me to be paintings or drawings as a child would make them naturally.” It is perhaps this quality in her work–fanciful, playful, uninhibited–that makes them.
She studied at a variety of schools, including the University of Florida, where she was initiated into Beta Tau Chapter. During this time, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her art helped her cope with her mental illness and provided a means for creative expression of her inner life.
Her work includes etchings, oil paintings, collages, and watercolors. Drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as American folk landscape and German allegorical paintings, her work frequently depicts fantastical animals and people populating surrealist landscapes of trees under aqua skies. One writer describes her paintings as “a bit of Henry Darger… , a bit of Chagall, a bit of Jacob Lawrence, a smidgeon of Grandma Moses. It is a primitive approach, seemingly naive, almost outsider in style, but when all is said and done, it is pure Rosemary.”
Some critics have appreciated a nostalgic quality in her work, where “her imagination takes us to where we all wish we could escape to in a perfect childhood. “People say I have a good imagination,” Rosemary said in a rare interview, “but this artwork seems to me to be paintings or drawings as a child would make them naturally.” It is perhaps this quality in her work–fanciful, playful, uninhibited–that makes them.
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