You paint what you know best; what you went through as a teenager and child. My world is the one I got to know in Medellin; I never paint anything else other than that.
Fernando BoteroRead
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.
Interpretation
Art is subjective and personal, and often defined by individual experiences rather than taught conventions.
Fernando Botero emphasizes the importance of personal exploration in art, suggesting that formal education can sometimes hinder creativity. He reflects on how not being given a rigid definition of art allowed him to develop his own unique perspective, in contrast to many students who may feel constrained by traditional teachings in fine arts.
In practice
During a speech at an art gallery opening, I could use Botero's quote to emphasize the importance of personal interpretation in creativity.
You paint what you know best; what you went through as a teenager and child. My world is the one I got to know in Medellin; I never paint anything else other than that.
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.
I love my country, and it hurts not to be able to see my country, as I did for so many years. I hope that I will one day be able to live in a peaceful Colombia.
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.
I was drawing a mandolin, and I made the sound hole very small, which made the mandolin look gigantic. I saw that making the details small made the form monumental. So in my figures, the eyes, the mouth are all small, and the exterior form is huge.
When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.
No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.
Sometimes, being a feminist artist, there are times where I'm in a position where I just want to feel like I'm saying all the right things politically, or I feel like I have to mention my own project over other people's projects. But I don't do that anymore. I just want to be off the cuff and honest.
I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
If I make a movie in English, the money will come from Europe, so that I can keep my independence and freedom. The way they produce in Hollywood doesn't fit me.
People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.
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