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.
[2] Afterwards, he worked at the artist-run centre Open Studio in Toronto as a printmaker, with Don Holman and Richard Sewell, becoming in time the director of etching and co-director of lithography.
[5] 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.
[4] He feels that with a print "there is an intimacy with paper which allows an artist to communicate a brief passage or a fleeting idea which is too fragile to convey with a big canvas or masonite or any other structural material" (1981).
[4] From 1981 until 1999, Otis Tamasauskas and sculptor and printer Jane Garland lived in a commercial hotel which they renovated at Priceville, Ontario.