Botero

Today I went to the Fernando Botero exhibit at the Pera Museum, and I was very impressed! Botero is a contemporary artist hailing from Columbia. His style is to make all of the subject matters--whether they be people, landscapes, animals, inanimate objects--more round than their real life counterparts. He believes in leaving realistic depictions to real life. Artists should instead take what they see and depict something that has been transformed in an intellectual and personal way. He wants his pieces to be distinctive and intuitively his.
His influences have included Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco as well as European Renaissance artists like Velázquez, de Goya, etc. The exhibit even had a collection of paintings where he did his own spoof off the characters from their famous paintings.