Together with other Galicia-born painters from his generation, like Manuel Colmeiro (1901-1999), OteroAbeledo, also known as Laxeiro, is one of the main exponents of the 1930s creative avant-garde that never relinquished its popular roots.

He began studying art in Havana, where his family had moved when he was a teenager. There he became interested in Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945) and Jesús Rodríguez Corredoyra (1889-1939), who had exhibitions in Cuba while he was still living there. On returning to Spain, he furthered his training in Madrid, shifting his attention towards a more traditional style, focused on the land and on his native rural environment.

His watercolours, oil paintings and prints veered toward a volume-based figuration sustained on great inner power. However, after the Spanish Civil War his work hardened, eluding naturalism and shifting towards a descriptive expressionism. Along with Manuel Colmeiro (1901-1999), Luis Seoane (1910-1979) and Carlos Maside (1897-1958), he was a member of the artists group called Los Renovadores del Arte Gallego(Reformers of Galician Art) for their attempt to fuse tradition and modernity.

The stage of his life spent in Vigo from 1942 to 1951 is one of his most fertile periods. It was then when he began to paint his first scenes with carnival characters, children’s subject matters and motherhoods.

In fact motherhood would remain a recurrent theme throughout the artist’s practice, rendered across different mediums and supports. In this case it is a charcoal sketch. Built with enveloping circles, often with several circumferences, here the circle outlines the closed figure of the baby held in its mother’s arms. Invested with a powerful sense of lyricism, his compositions frequently include ordinary people from the countryside.