Ana Maria Botero


Artist Ana Maria Botero Glass Flower Art

Ana Maria Botero was born in Bogota, Colombia. Growing up she loved math and was torn between engineering and architecture as professional pursuits. She settled upon architecture and earned her degree from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in 1990. Eleven years later Ana Maria made the big move to the United States, settling in Florida. In 2005, the opportunity to move to the beautiful state of Colorado presented itself and Ana Maria and her family happened upon Longmont and subsequently Loveland, Colorado for their new home. It was here that Ana Maria decided to forego her architectural background and pursue art as more than a passion. She has been working as an artist ever since.

Ana Maria’s architectural background and Colombian roots inform her works, but it was a trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in 2010 that really stirred her soul. She was fascinated by the Body Worlds exhibit, which featured the human circulatory system encased in glass. She found the exhibition a bit eerie, but she could not stop looking at it. Something about the empty space found within the glass fascinated her. She says, “Art is a sense to me, it is a way of perceiving, it is an emotional response to the relationship of forms and the magic of the empty space that transcends and creates equilibrium.”   

Ana Maria seeks simplicity, calm and balance in her art, emotions that all of us are surely fond of. She wants every new piece to engage her viewers yet leave them with a new way to imagine their world. The mystery and perfection found in her work has her viewers mesmerized as they walk around her three-dimensional glass sculptures.

Flowers that seem so incredibly round are anything but, as each piece is precisely painted on multiple panels of glass. Ana Maria has mastered the art of illusion. She paints on the glass with the single hair of a paintbrush, allowing for exquisite detail. She can manipulate the paint until she bakes the glass, at which point paint and glass become one. Her finished pieces often appear more lifelike than real flowers themselves.

Ana Maria is constantly pushing herself to explore new methods of creating artwork and she also paints two-dimensional works and creates large scale wooden, metal and cardboard sculptures. She is an artist’s artist, always learning and pushing boundaries.

Of her glass pieces she says, ‘Why is it that I’m so interested in the empty space?’ And then I thought, ‘Well, it makes sense.’ As an architect, the important thing is not the walls, it is the space you’re creating. I’m looking for that empty space — that’s where the magic happens.”

Artist Statement:

"What I search for, what informs my work, is what I need for myself: simplicity, calm, equilibrium. I want each piece to engage viewers yet leave them with their own response and perhaps with a way to re-imagine their world.”