Before anything else, I started painting bulls and matadors. That was my initiation to paint.

You paint what you know best; what you went through as a teenager and child. My world is the one I got to know in Medellin; I never paint anything else other than that.

People say, 'What a discipline, painting so much.' I say, 'No, I love it.' Nothing amuses me as much as my work. To have discipline would be not to paint.

I had wanted to be a sculptor throughout life, but to do so, I had to stop painting.

I often think about death, and it saddens me to leave this world and not be able to paint more. I love it so much.

Art is important because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like 'Guernica.' People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.