Creating a world of well-rounded folks

Fernando Botero has been painting for decades now, but he views every new painting as "an adventure and a discovery".

The prolific Colombian artist says painting for him has always been a novelty because he is "the first person to be surprised by what will happen" on his own canvas.

The 83-year-old man now brings his artistic surprises to Beijing, with his first exhibition on the Chinese mainland, Botero in China, displaying 96 large-format oil paintings and drawings since the 1970s, at the National Museum of China. The display started on Nov 21 and runs through Jan 2.

On show are included his famous works on the themes of circus and bullfighters. The exhibition also presents re-created classics by Botero to pay tribute to his mentors, including Rubens, Van Eyck and Diego Velazquez.

The exhibition reviews how Botero established and developed a rare artistic style of portraying subjects in volume. He has painted healthy people for long.

His early influence came from the paintings he saw in Florence in '50s that he felt were quite "volumetric". It was years later in Mexico that he found an individual personal style of expression while painting a still life of himself holding a mandolin, and the musical instrument's round body enlightened him to paint objects also in a round way.

Botero has since used the feel of volume to bring alive fruits, flowers, animals and humans on canvas. And his rich, vibrant palette has added a strong touch of Latin American art to his works. By doing so, he has invited audiences to glimpse the realities of Latin America, a region he has great affection for.

Although some of the figures in his paintings have been referred to as "Botero's fat family", the artist says he paints that way because he believes "volume is very important" in his art.

In his paintings, Botero creates a contrast between the large and the small in a disproportional way. For example, the women are often depicted with big, round faces, and big bodies with chubby limbs, earing tiny accessories.

"These small elements allow him to magnify the essence of volume, and to extol volume and form," Juan Carlos Botero, the artist's son, tells China Daily.

Through representations of Latino society, Fernando Botero has injected his feelings for different classes. While dictators, politicians, police and businessmen look cruel and absurd because of their wrongdoings, the homeless, dancers, bullfighters, circus performers and common people look confused, naive yet lovingly funny.

The scenes from many of his works are descriptions of what he witnessed in his childhood and as a young adult in Colombia: the houses in Medelline, when he was born and lived until the age of 19, his family home, from which his recalls his mother often walking out and the winding streets leading up to a mountain.

His images aren't entirely based on real-life models but his own style of satire.

Botero's works are figurative and meanwhile very close to abstract art, says Juan Carlos Botero.

"For him, the harmony of colors and the beauty of composition are more essential than the anecdotes."

The son says at times his father would turn his paintings around after completing them to determine which color need another coat, and which element requires to be smaller to balance the composition and to create a sense of serenity, beauty and calmness.

Botero's works tend to freeze his subjects in time and communicate an eternal loss of sensation, which is a fundamental aspect he inherited from Piero Francesca, a 15th-century Italian painter.

As a tribute to Francesca, Botero reproduced his paired portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, but placed them in a setting of Latin America.

The paintings are on display at Botero in China.

The Beijing exhibition shows only a part of Botero's art world in which he also works with sculptures and fresco paintings. His productiveness is not only as a result of attention to detail and artistic technique. He is also a workaholic to whom birthdays and festivals mean little.

Juan Carlos Botero describes his father as "a very strange person" who has seldom taken vacations.

"Every single day he draws and sculpts, and he always has new ideas," Juan Carlos Botero says. "He arrives in his studio at about 7 am and leaves at 8 pm. He has no assistant. He does all the work all by himself."

But in the eyes of his grandchildren, Fernando Botero is playful and funny.

When his grandchildren were very young, the artist would tell them he was too tired to work on the lower half of his paintings and would let them scribble. Later, he would erase their drawings and continue to paint over the same.

"He believes life is worth living. That is why he has lived and worked so long," Juan Carlos Botero says of his illustrious father.