Before digital, there was Frida…
Photographers do it all the time with the lens–snap those moments of life that not only capture a moment in time but what matters in that moment also becomes evident to keen observers. Before digital, Frida Kahlo’s way of doing it was with her self-portraits. With her remarkable name, she is memorable for pouring her humility and passion onto canvas for strangers to view and examine. To the beginner’s eye, some of her self-portraits will appear dark and narcissistic but beneath the paint are stories stroked with rich hues of her life and death.
Her paintings mimic her heart pulsating rapidly to the beats of pain and passion. Stories of her crippling accident and her love for Diego Rivera are balanced with a dualistic paradox. To endure her anguish, she sublimated herself onto canvas to make sense of her reality. Her paintings are raw and unfiltered and gives us access to bliss in life as well as bliss in death. Her portraits serve as an autopsy to study not in a morbid but enlightening way.
Her story and portraits are amazing to view for a particular purpose: what matters? What matters in life, clearly surfaces to be examined. To examine is to focus. With focus, pictures of our lives become less obscured and gives us the opportunity to extract some truth out of it. The gift of a great piece of art is that it is truthful and raw. Some of the most amazing photographs capture a scene in its natural state. In the same way, Frida Kahlo captures an honest life with her photograghs of herself as depicted on canvas with colors that represent where she was physically and emotionally throughout her life.
