Fernando Botero - Larger than Life

“Many people know me as the painter of the ‘fat ladies,' and it doesn't disturb me,” said the Colombian artist Fernando Botero (b. 1932) in an article for WMagazine.

Botero is a painter, sculptor and draftsman renowned for his extravagantly rounded figures. His humorous exaggeration has a carnivalisque tone that belies the more serious content of Botero's work-commentary on colonialism, political instability in Latin America, and the vernacular artistic traditions of the region, as well as European art history. 
 

 

I find the characters in his paintings rather appealing - they are larger than life - but for me it is the 'personalities' coming through rather than the physical sizes. 

They remind me of Dog-Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry. She weighs more than an elephant and, as a child, broke both her father's legs when she sat on his knees. She had smallpox which left behind caves on her face that were home enough for fleas. Her nose flat, eyebrows heavy,  she has only a few teeth that are blackened and broken. And she is not adverse to committing the odd crime. Yet the love she shows her son and those around her - well, I couldn't help but warm to her.

Image by Albert Robida

And there is Rabelais' Gargantua. As a baby he required 17,913 cows each day to supply his milk. At a year and 10 months he is described as having a fine face and almost 18 chins, but shat himself every hour. When he turned 18 his father ordered new clothes to be made, requiring 1350 yards of Chatelleraut linen, his codpiece 25 yards and his shoes 609 yards of purple velvet.

Such a grotesque figure yet something charming about him, especially when he learns the errors of his ways.