Pure Colombian

The Jesuit School got hold of him but not for long. Botero's admiration of Cubist Picasso aroused wrath and was deemed irreligious, 'even Communist', and he was told to recant. He refused, was expelled and set o on the road of life. In Bogota, at 19, he mixed with Colombia's modest avant-garde and painted like Blue Period Picasso.

In the Nineties Botero's life and art became as dark as drug-battled Colombia. In 1994 he was dragged from his house and kidnapped. A bomb blew up one of his Bogota street sculptures, The Bird, in 1995, killing 27 people.

His son Fernando, a former minister of defence, did 30 months in jail in 1996 for taking $6 million from the Cali drug cartel for Ernesto Samper's presidential campaign. Botero did not speak to him for three years. Fernando Jr got another 36 months in 2002 for stealing 800 million pesos. He has refused to return from Mexico (where he has citizenship) to do the time.

Gripping Botero's life may be, but his art is more so. His painted women (unlike his wives) are very well-made, large, fat. Why always so?

Out comes the Kalashnikov again. America and Britain make idols of Posh Spice, Kate Moss and size zero spindly girls because we are 'life-denying Protestants', Fernando roars. 'Protestantism is a culture of thinness, a culture of denial. The life of Latin America is one of excess. We live life to the full - we drink a lot, we make love a lot, we drink champagne while you Protestants drink water.'

Living life to the full, it emerges, is why Botero's tarts and nuns and nurses are unashamedly voluptuous, while his generals bulge with rump steaks inside their uniforms. According to him, 50 years ago he happened on distorted overblown art forms when painting a mandolin. By accidentally making the slit holes far too small, he found he had created a monumental object. This was how, as a teenager, he discovered the style to which he has stuck all his life. A sympathy for Rubenesque people developed with study of the Flemish artist.

Large people and life in Colombia are his art. Why, then, won't he live in Colombia? Why spend most of the year in Paris? Why did he live for 14 years in New York, home of life-denying Protestants?

The answer, for a very long time, was that Botero did not feel safe in Colombia. The drug cartels ruled the countryside and smaller towns like Medellin; he was a target for kidnappers and worse. In 2000, after staying away from the subject for decades, Botero began to paint images of Colombian violence and in 2007 produced what for many are the masterpieces of his art: a series of motionless frames of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

All this said and these enemies made, Colombia is a far safer place than it used to be, under its new president. Botero agrees but still lives there only one month a year. 'I always have to have two or three people sleeping in my home - I am very protected - and I move in a bulletproof car.'

Fernando needs to be in Europe. His dealers are here, his foundry is in Italy and his activity is '90 to 100 per cent' in Europe and the US. I sense he prefers to live here. The truth is that he is a man of the world, a happy exile, no? 'I am a man of Colombia,' he roars. 'I am 100 per cent Colombian. My subject matter is Colombian. My accent is Colombian. I did not feel American after living there 14 years and I do not feel French because I live in Paris.' Had his life had a different script he may have happily lived in Colombia.

'Colombia is a good place. Without doubt.' But there's a catch. 'I like the challenge of living in an important society with museums and great art and, above all, competition. The tendency of an artist is to feel happy with what he does. You do not evolve into anything greater. I need competition to feel challenged. When you live in a country that does not have that, you become soft. In London, New York, Paris, you feel the competition, the need to do better.' Colombia, he says, is tough, not soft, a land of warlords, guerrillas and drugs, but to develop as an artist 'I had to leave'. Colombia, says Fernando, spelled mediocrity as an artist, a state in which he could not go beyond the immediate subject matter 'into the universal'. It was imperative to get out so that he and his fat ladies could grow.

Botero's exhibition is at Thomas Gibson Fine Art, 31 Bruton Street, W1, until 8 April