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| Frida Kahlo - Self-portrait, The broken column, 1944 |
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| Frida Kahlo in her studio with The Two Fridas, Coyoacán, Mexico |
It is a tumultuous affair to merely look at her paintings, or read about Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), let alone--I imagine--to have been Frida Kahlo. She underwent 30 surgeries in her life (related to impediments she had since birth and a major accident when she was 18), had 3 abortions and no children, her one leg was eventually amputated, and she had a torrential emotional life. Painting came to her at a time she was physically impaired unable to move. Because of her work, life, and the inspiration she was visited with, a great romantic imagination surrounds Ms. Kahlo today. Her paintings are straight forward, personal, representational, sometimes full of pain. She embodies the popular concept of an Artist with a capital A.
What is the place that representation holds in painting and drawing today? And what is it relation to me? Pain and love and the story of the self were important for Ms. Kahlo's work. But such intensities are not present in all art one sees. Are they?
Language can evaporate the ephemeral. And today my ideas are ephemeral or perhaps non-present. Best to start a new drawing...
In the painting below titled, "What the Water Gave Me" Kahlo has painted a vision perhaps she had while bathing. In the middle of the painting one can see a naked Kahlo being strangled indirectly as the rope goes through various nodes before reaching its end, or wrapping itself around Kahlo's neck. Insects and figures do a tight rope walk on this very strangling device. Her dress floats away close by, a bird lies dead on a tree top, a building is consumed by a fire volcano, a couple hides behind a bush, a ship is close by this imagination, one woman comforts another. It is a fragile system, a vulnerable system... Maybe it is a spider that has trapped Kahlo.
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| What the Water Gave Me, Frida Kahlo, 1938 |
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| Self-Portrait with Monkey, Kahlo Frida, 1938 |
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