Fernando Botero Quotes

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

If I was painting a picture, I wouldn't want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I'd rather show people what it looks like when it's done.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

My painting does not come from the easel.

One drawing demands to become a painting, so I start to work on that, and then the painting might demand something else. Then the painting might say, 'I want a companion, and the companion should be like this,' so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the image.

I am like a folk painter. Paint and move ahead.

I started painting when I was in high school.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

When I'm drawing, I'm drawing with the light, being completely open and creative. I can't draw in the evening. I need light and I need warmth if it is a summer thing, and I need cold if it is a winter collection. The good thing is that I have houses to go to whenever I'm working. I draw according to the place.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

Well, I've been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple.

Over the years I always did some water colors, and I did a series of pictures of drawings. I always did it during a period of time that was slow in the photo business, but in essence it was always frustrating because I'd get started, and then it would be time to get back to work and I wouldn't get anywhere with the painting.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.