Best quotes by Fernando Botero on Art

Checkout quotes by Fernando Botero on Art

• ‟ 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.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ There's nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it's a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ The only duty an artist has is in the quality of the art. There is no moral obligation to denounce. An artist confronted with a tremendous injustice sometimes feels inclined to say something. Denouncing the situation is the artist's choice.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ I love art so much because of curiosity. At the start of a painting, I know 10 percent of what the painting will be, and then I have to improvise the whole thing.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ All my life, my girlfriends are always skinny. Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in reality. Why do you like primitive art? Because there is beauty in the deformity. Sometimes paintings that people consider realistic are not at all. Raphael figures look realistic, but in real life, they were deformed.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ Art is always an exaggeration in some sense; in color, in form, even in theme, etc... but it has always been this way. It is the same with the nature of some works by Giotto or Massacio, or the color of life as expressed by Van Gogh.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ Nobody ever told me, 'Art is this.' This was good luck in a way because I would have had to spend half of my life forgetting everything that I had been told, which is what happens with most students in schools of fine arts.

  - Fernando Botero
  

• ‟ Expression without culture is flat. Many artists come out of art school and start doing things that don't last. They are audacious because of ignorance. They are irresponsible.

  - Fernando Botero