Light in the Dark

I love to read GQ, which will probably surprise my friends because I was always the girly girl in the group. Anywho, I fell in love with GQ after reading an article that was published in an anthology of magazine articles. My hubster even got a subscription for me since he got to subscribe to a bunch of magazines that he really wanted. Where am I going with all these random tangents? Let me get back on track.

I just read a really interesting article about Fernando Botero called Extraordinary Renditions by Charles Bowden (November 2007). I can't say that I'm that interested in his art, but I found the article very well written. It touched on all sorts of topics such as what does it mean to be an artist, who is Fernando Botero, how does torture become art, and what does it mean to be patriotic in America post 9/11. Here are two of my favorite excerpts:

He is a curious person--one who loses his father early and struggles simple to survive, who is formed by a culture of violence and then earns his way out of Colombia by winning a national prize with a scene of torture. And after all this, he deliberately seeks out and creates a world of beauty and peace and people having good times in parks and beaches and circuses and bars. This is the Colombia Botero has never known, because it is the Colombia that has never existed. Like his contemporary Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he enters a fantasy world so that the barbarism of real life becomes bearable. He sets out to create a visual world without pain.

I am the man who loves his country and must face the brutal truths of that love. Fernando Botero is the man who believes in America.

If you can get a hold of the November 2007 edition of GQ, I definitely recommend reading this article. It's definitely worth reading and gets you thinking. With this new perspective, I'm going to try harder to get through Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.