Colombian - Artist | April 19, 1932 -
My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.
Fernando Botero
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An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.
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Art is important because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like 'Guernica.' People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.
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I was drawing a mandolin, and I made the sound hole very small, which made the mandolin look gigantic. I saw that making the details small made the form monumental. So in my figures, the eyes, the mouth are all small, and the exterior form is huge.
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The circus is a global theme. It exists in all parts of the world - maybe not in Africa, but it exists in Asia in all parts. In Latin America, it's difficult to find a person who hasn't gone to the circus.
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I had wanted to be a sculptor throughout life, but to do so, I had to stop painting.
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I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.
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I often think about death, and it saddens me to leave this world and not be able to paint more. I love it so much.
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You paint what you know best; what you went through as a teenager and child. My world is the one I got to know in Medellin; I never paint anything else other than that.
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I follow politics very closely. I read several newspapers every day.
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In a photo, you just do a click, but in art you have to put in so much energy. This concentration of energy and attention says something that other media cannot say.
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In the '60s, I did many satirical portraits of dictators.
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