Sometimes companions find you after they have died. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has erupted into my imagination and prurient interests. Or at least the sensate-intellectual fascinations of a recovering academic. Love, death, new life, birth...they're all here as thematic seductions for my writing-self today.
[Inarticulate intuition grasped from thin air this adjective, prurient, whose definition I was only peripherally/subconsciously aware. A quick online definition-inquiry later? I learn it means “marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire” with specific attention to sex. I laughed, unaware I had meant that but too amused to let it go. My sense is that it’s not unwholesome in the least, though perhaps ‘dangerous’ in the Estés sense of it… ‘held within my danger,’ my soul’s commitment and value, strength and passions for life.]
An artist of international acclaim, Frida beckons us into her work, her imagery, her “pain and passion,” to quote an introductory book. Her work became the first of Mexican artists to find ‘voice’ at the Louvre in Paris. She painted her way into a Surreal-esque style, but not through any training by Surrealists. As such, her work never quite leaves the reality at hand, so doesn’t qualify as Surreal in any formal sense. Throughout her oeuvre, she invites us into the complexities of impassioned human life—physical injury and painful (un)recovery, life’s loves fraught with connection and betrayal, awareness outside societal norms or preferences, cultural gifts unwelcomed by the “over-culture” around her…more.
From her, I learn that ex-voto’s are simple sketches or paintings of utter devotion, significant and popular within her Mexican (Mestizo) cultures. Estés offers examples of these in her own recent work on Holy Mother, Untie the Strong Woman. Is there invitation to explore such a tradition for me? Is it possible to offer a sketch or drawing or painting as an ex-voto, unconcerned about the aesthetics of others, concerned only to be true to the devotion one knows? I also learn that one of Frida’s “favourite subjects” is “the birth of new life through death.” Not only is it a part of her own imagination-psyche-understanding, it is a significant contribution of Mexican culture to all of us. The Day of the Dead in Mexico, for instance, is not a day of mourning but of celebration. Death’s intimate partner is new life, not the void or nothingness. New life.
Frida’s capacity to paint self-portrait after self-portrait after self-portrait enlivens the most of something unknown or unclear, however. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best,” she said. I, too, find myself often alone. I, too, write of my internal experiences (here) again and again. My Protestant propensity for guilt in self-assessed selfishness pains this practice sometimes. “What navel-gazing,” I sometimes hear my mind’s editors say—my “council of apes” who distract me from what yearns to pour forth. But perhaps there is offering to the world, to its healing and redemption, in such capacity for self-portraits, again and again. Frida’s inner-gaze has touched me deeply, enlivened something in me that I did not know was there, do not know how to articulate yet.
One image found me a couple months ago and it draws a lot of these themes together. “The Two Fridas,” painted in 1939. It marks a work completed shortly after Frida’s divorce from her life’s love, Diego Rivera, upon the affair he had with her own sister, Cristina. [I was startled to learn of their remarriage a couple years later, though with mutual understanding of redefined roles.] You can find a variety of commentary on the symbolism contained in this image, but I’m fascinated with the whole-hearted, full-blooded, earthy Frida in Tehuana costume, holding hands with the European-contained, lacy and blood-letting Frida. I do not think my receiving has much to do with her intentions or communications, but I value what I see, for what my experience is, is becoming. There is a whole-heartedness to the Frida connected to the earth, to her land, to her people. The European part of her shows much more pain, injury, surgical-trauma. What does it mean for the European side of an artist to lose blood? Even to die? I wonder. Is it better for such an attribution or accretion to die, or would that be a tragedy too? At the very least, this image mirrors something significant for me, for my learning. If death’s intimate partner is new life, is there value in letting previously chosen or imposed identities die? Do we welcome the pain of a life passionately lived, offering its images and intensities back in devotion that seems to come from elsewhere?
Ex-voto offerings. Birth of new life through dying. Repeated self-portraits. These are gifts to consider amidst a season of endings and beginnings. I love the poetry of her images the most. Purely symbolic items, tied to other symbolic items, resting within a reality everyone can recognize as it claims them, willingly or not. I love Frida’s capacity to startle her patrons or viewers the most, I think. She seems unafraid to paint-name the violence of life, or the things we work so hard to keep hidden. Like birth, our own or that of others.
A blessing to receive such companions, even after they have died.
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