Fernando Botero Quotes

The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.

My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify, and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity.

It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.

As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.

Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.

If one is talking about sculpture then scale and skin is everything.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Whether it's a computer or a pen drawing, design is about drawing shapes and making physical things.

The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.

I've always been interested in art, architecture, color.

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.

Form follows beauty.

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

A figure with curves always offers a lot of interesting angles.

The dinosaur's eloquent lesson is that if some bigness is good, an overabundance of bigness is not necessarily better.

Dimension regulated the general scale of the work, so that the parts may all tell and be effective.

There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering!

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones.

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

I see lines of space. I break things down into lines and space, and I balance.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.