Whimsical paintings bring success

Press, 29 December 1986, Page 4

Whimsical paintings bring success

Barbara Bright

of Reuters through NZPA PARIS The bulbous bishops, fat whores, dumpy dictators and overstuffed children created by the Colombian artist, Fernando Botero, cannot be called pretty, or even proportional. He paints some of his subjects with crossed eyes, and to add spots of colour to a composition he uses snakes and flies, or cigarette butts and toy trains. Yet his paintings and sculptures have a lushness and a naive whimsy that delight the viewer, and his art works are among the most easily recognisable, and the most popular, in the world. Retrospectives of his paintings and sculptures are now touring Europe and Japan, and an expensive SUSI2S new book on his sculptures has just been published in the United States, timed for the Christmas market. Botero’s larger paintings sell for between $lOO,OOO and $200,000, but he told Reuters in an interview that he sells only about 10 per cent of what he produces. He recently gave a large sculpture of a torso to his hometown of Medellin, as well as paintings and sculptures to museums in Bogota and Caracas. “I’m not painting to make money,” he said. “Now I can pay the rent I couldn’t care less about money. I do it because I like it. That is my life.” Botero, who shuttles between studios in Paris, New York, Cajica outside Bogota, and Pietrasanta, Italy, has been a professional painter for 35 years and a sculptor for 15.

“In my family there has never been an artist. I liked to draw in school, and more and more I started to be obsessed with painting,” Botero recalled. He had his first oneman show in Bogota when he was 19 years old. He won a national prize for painting and was sent to Madrid. “My dream like any young painter was to come to Paris, find a studio, become Toulouse Lautrec or something like that,” he said. However, seeing a copy of a picture by the fifteenth century Florentine Painter, Piero della Francesca, in a Madrid bookstore one night changes his goal. “I was paralyzed by the beauty. I had never see della Francesca. You know coming from Colombia, we had Picasso or Chagall or Michelangelo, but that was all.” He decided to study in Flroence instead of Paris, and the painting style, he developed was based on “the fullness, the roundness” of the Renaissance masters instead of French expressionists dr American abstractionists. Botero does not consider his figures fat. “I don’t paint fat people,” he has often been quoted as saying. “They look rather thin to me.” It was Giotto’s introduction of volume to art that paved the way for three dimensions on a flat surface and created the basis for the Renaissance, said Botero. “I believe very strongly that volume is an important element in art,” he said, “I love Giotto, I love Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, who always

work in this kind of roundness, this kind of monumental feeling.” In 1960 he went to New York and six months later one of his paintings, “Mona Lisa, age 12,” was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. In 1966 he had his first one-man show in Europe at museums in Baden-Baden and Munich. His subjects are always Colombian. “You find your language,” he explained, “but you have to say something. A painter should paint what he knows best. I have spent all my z life in New York, here, everywhere, but I am 100 per cent Colombian. Despite his success around the world, some New York critics cooled to his work. Botero says this stems from his figurative, dream-like style being “exactly the opposite of what American art is.” In 1988, however, three retrospectives are planned in Florida, Texas and West Coast museums, he said. Botero said his style has evolved through the years but not changed. “After Picasso everybody thinks that a painter should change styles like he changes shirts,” said Botero. “Traditionally an artist has an idea or an obsession, then you go deeper exploring the possibilities of this, j,. conviction. To change style is to change conviction.” He has decided, however, that his recent works are too technically proficient “Perhaps I learn too much,” he said. “I like the more geometric, the more primitive feeling that was in my earlier works.”