Why does fernando botero draw fat

Of course it is not that, because when I do a still life or an animal, or a landscape, the deformation is the same as for a human body, because I think volume is a very important element in the art of painting. Are you ever inspired to paint contemporary figures, or work from contemporary culture? Not really. When I was very young, like 13 or 14 years old, I was fascinated by the [Alberto] Vargas girls I saw in an Esquire magazine.

I did some copies in watercolor. Perhaps they were the first things that I did. Then I discovered real art and forgot about Vargas. Do you ever look at social media? My work is the result of a long time reflection of what art should be.

It has nothing to do with contemporary culture, social media, selfies and Kim Kardashian. In the past, your work has also represented political issues like drug violence in Colombia and torture at Abu Ghraib.

According to Vargas Llosa, for Botero, obesity is a point of view and a method rather than a concrete reality. They are a visual feast rather than the glorification of desire, a song of the appetites, or a defense of instinct.

Is the power of rhetoric greater than the evidence of the senses? Picasso went through periods in which volume played a substantive role in his depictions of the human body, but the figures that he produced were seldom so double-chinned, so… Precious. Nevertheless, one reads more than volume into that historical royal portrait; kingly obesity and its biographical context is an important part of that work.

There is one additional point to be made. Portrait of Mario Vargas Llosa Botero produced this work in , after he had done similar work about the violence in his native Colombia. He offered to donate all the works in the exhibition to a museum or museums that would commit to showing at least some of them permanently. Mind you, Danto is not one of the opaque, obscurantist dilettanti who have turned criticism into a game where artworks matter little and adherence to absurd theories is paramount.

Asked if he was attracted to "fat women", Botero said: "No, no, not at all. I have been attached to three women, all of them skinny. He had three children with his first wife, former Colombian culture minister Gloria Zea, and had a son with his second wife, Cecilia Zambrano.

The interview also touched on his narrow escape from a fire that broke out in his holiday home in the province of Antioquia in northwestern Colombia while he was staying there with friends in January. Botero said he is lucky to be alive: "I woke up and we managed to get out, in the dark, without any light, with everything full of smoke and almost asphyxiated but we managed it. It is a miracle I am alive," he told the newspaper. One of the world's most sought-after contemporary artists, Botero has works on display in museums and parks around the world.