Visual Arts Support Healing Needs
Waterbury teen sells paintings to help pay for father’s medical bills
Dad has diabetes and needs kidney transplant
WATERBURY
Angelina Soto’s first works of art were scribbles and stick figures; but as she grew older and her talent improved, she graduated to oil painting.
Now, the 14-year-old is using her skills to ease her family’s medical bills, selling her paintings to provide income as her father suffers from diabetes so severe it’s nearly blinded him and left him needing a kidney transplant.
“To do one painting, it takes her a good four to five hours and then some,” her mom, Millie Soto, said. “So she does put a lot of love and caring into her paintings.”
Millie Soto said her husband, Angel Soto, has battled diabetes since the age of 14, but in recent years it has taken a turn for the worse.
The disease has left him blind in one eye, nearly blind in the other, stints in his heart and kidney failure that requires dialysis three days a week, she said.
And that’s left the family with only one source of income outside of Social Security: Millie Soto’s salary as a receiving inspector at the Siemon Co. in Watertown.
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The time off she needs to take to care for her husband, she said, cuts into that paycheck. So, she said, Angelina stepped up with the offer to sell her artwork.
“I think that she has a very, very big heart and she sees the struggles that we’re going through and what we’re doing,” she said. “She figured the only way she can help… is through her art.”
Angelina Soto said she draws inspiration from online searches for art people have purchased to hang in their homes, then paints something similar.
“I had a lot of family that did art, spray painting and drawing; I kind of got my inspiration through them,” she said. “But not only them, also my teachers, how they kind of taught history through art. I kind of wanted to do what they did.”
The teen sold a few pieces last week at her mother’s fundraising tag sale at their Farrington Avenue home, and plans to display them at the tag sale on Saturday. Most of the paintings will cost $20 or less, her mom said.
“I’m very good at getting donations. That’s where my strength is at,” Millie Soto said. “A lot of people donate their items to me and then I just take that and I try to raise money from there.”
Her husband’s Medicare doesn’t cover much, she said, adding the family owes at least $2,000 in medical bills related to his illness.
“His medical bills are way up there. The co-pays are not too, too bad; we’re working on them,” she said. “Whatever’s not covered I just try to cover on my income alone because I’m the only one working in the home. I try to do whatever I can to raise and bring money in to help with the family.”
Still, she said, she’ll only put half the proceeds from the tag sale and her daughter’s artwork toward her husband’s medical bills.
“With everything that I do to raise money for my husband, I want to also raise money for the Waterbury Baptist Ministry Youth, for their mission, because we like to give back to the community and the kids especially,” she said.
This isn’t the first time the mother-daughter team hosted a charity yard sale.
In 2016, Angelina approached her mom with the idea to host a “girls only” tag sale to raise money to provide caps and gowns for the 25% of Waterbury high school students who can’t afford them. She even donated a number of toys and other items from her bedroom.
But this issue, Millie Soto said, is closer to her daughter’s heart, as well as to that of her 20-year-old daughter, Selena Soto, a University of New Haven student who decided to work at a school internship this summer to also offset Angel Soto’s medical bills.
“It’s very hard on the girls and it’s very tough on them to see what their father’s going through,” she said. “They see it. They feel it. They’re just trying to use any strength they have to help, because that’s all they can do.”
WAMS student's art on display at Christmas Gallery
Republican American December 13, 2109
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