Fernando Botero Quotes

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.

When I was a student looking at Leonardo DaVinci and all those guys - Italian, Dutch, or whatever - it's incredible how each piece of the painting fits to the main theme that they want to express.

I'm drawn to silhouettes because of their emblematic rather than their illustrational quality. I see them as shapes, allowing an image to become an abstraction and for pure painting to take place.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

The way I paint is similar to rock in that you don't stand around and say, 'Gee, what are they talking about?' Rock is simple, blunt, colorful. Same with my paintings. You don't stand back and wonder what it is. That's Jim Morrison, that's a panda, that's a scene on the West Coast. It's not abstract.

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

I'm using my art to comment on what I see. You don't have to agree with it.

I don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

As an artist you have the luxury of maybe presenting an issue in a certain way, as opposed to actually solving it.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.

I love color. When I paint, I use a lot of color. I love art that has a vibrancy of color and compositions. I adore the Impressionists, and I'm influenced strongly by them as a self-taught artist.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!