Fernando Botero Quotes

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

Being an artist, you soak up imagery, and you put it back out in whatever form you do your own imagery.

An artiste's input, her ability to create dimensions within the given space is very important.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Making art is different for everyone.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

I made one untitled piece.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.