Hilary- contemporary art- Fernando Botero

In high school, I visited an exhibit at the Delaware Art Museum called "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero" and fell in love with Colombian contemporary painter Fernando Botero's works. I think they are largely clever, exuberant, tongue-in-cheek, colorful, and highly reflective of many aspects of life. I couldn't believe Botero's works were so contemporary, because they have a sort of timeless appeal: the social commentary depicted in his photos can apply to all peoples from anywhere or anywhen. This painting is called The First Lady, and like Botero does in many of his pieces, he exaggerates and highlights aspects of humanity that are, for example, odd, funny, absurd, endearing, or just characteristic of the individual or object. The woman here is oversized, with large facial features and skin exemplified, atop an equally as uneasy and caricatured horse. in all his images, Botero depicts things that occur in everyday life, humanity, politics, and nature with folkish satire and an observant eye that makes us think twice, as art often should. If anyone is interested, more about Botero/the exhibit: http://www.delart.org/exhibitions/past/fernando_botero.html

 

On that note, I thought I would mention, check out Emerson’s, an inspiration for me, definition of art in his essay Nature:

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.. The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, -- that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, -- the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.