A biography for Fernando Boterohasn’t been written yet.
“In the '60s, I did many satirical portraits of dictators.”
“Expression without culture is flat. Many artists come out of art school and start doing things that don't last. They are audacious because of ignorance. They are irresponsible.”
“Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.”
“Art is important because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like 'Guernica.' People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.”
“Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.”
“אמן נמשך לצורות מסוימות בלי לדעת מדוע. האינטואיציה מובילה אותך. רק אחר כך אתה מנסה למצוא רציונליזציה ואף צידוק לכך.”
“אני מייצג את ההיפך ממה שמתרחש באמנות כיום.”
“העושר שבאמן נוצר משילוב של ההשפעות שעיצבו את חייו ואת אמנותו.”
“בני אדם זקוקים למוזיקה, ספרות וציור... כדי לפצות את עצמם על הגסות והחומרנות שבחיים.”
“נוף מצויר הוא תמיד יפה יותר מהנוף האמיתי.”
“אני מתאר בצורה ריאליסטית מציאות לא ריאלסטית.”
“I believe that it's better to have a conviction, believe strongly in something, and then the convictions create a style that reflects your mentality.”
“I had an uncle who took me to the ring in Medellin when I was 15 years old. In school, we had someone who taught us how to bullfight.”
“All my life, my girlfriends are always skinny. Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in reality. Why do you like primitive art? Because there is beauty in the deformity. Sometimes paintings that people consider realistic are not at all. Raphael figures look realistic, but in real life, they were deformed.”
“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 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.”
“People say, 'What a discipline, painting so much.' I say, 'No, I love it.' Nothing amuses me as much as my work. To have discipline would be not to paint.”
“My work is a self-portrait of my mind, a prism of my convictions.”
“An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.”
“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.”