and
paint it
the consolation of your face.
You watch you observe your desire
close up and afar
and
at the same time
you paint
You sanctify your pain
and
paint it
with care
love
with utmost tenderness
you watch and tend it
paint.
the limping line
you write
beautiful faltering
You double yourself
or triple yourself
placed on the various stages of your psyche
floating past now on a sponge there you go
a swooning woman with another woman
loving or with a
monkey curling
or a fetus curled up or
the self—
its thousand consolations.
Resourceful, wouldn’t you say? laughing you paint
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
Self-Portrait with Braid, or with Monkey, or with Cropped Hair
A series of self-portraits. Self-portrait with pompier. Self-portrait with young Arlesian. Self-portrait in red by a fountain. Self-portrait as lighthouse keeper. Or on the rue Saint Jacques.
What the language gave. What the paint—
drawn to the longing
Each mark a door
Each word a boat
The Chinese yin and yang sign,
a mystical griffin,
and in the upper-right-hand corner
the outlined footprint often found in Mexican codices indicating the direction of events.
a red pressure
or yellow — a yellow feeling—
Yellow—
color of madness, sickness, fear
leaf green: leaves, sadness, science. The
whole of Germany is this color.
you paint:
a skeleton running down the page or a Frida caressed by paws—reddish purple — old blood of the prickly pear, the brightest, the oldest, and brown — color of mole, of leaves becoming earth.
real and imaginary celebrating animals
and the smeared mouth.
Hayden Herrara: she would proceed as if she were painting a fresco rather than an oil, first drawing the general outlines of her image in pencil and ink and then, starting in the upper left corner, working with slow, patient concentration across and from the top downward, completing each area as she went along.
there, there … touch me there
and you add paint tenderly sweetly
touch me—
and she puts a little paint—there
something blooms
a ripe fruit
her face
the dark corridors of sensibility
A skull with flowers
look
She smiles.
dalliance grief in the afternoon, love
navy blue: distance. Also tenderness can be of this blue.
from the near and far
Blood in the corner now saturating the page
Accident: the landscape is day and night.
Obscene
obscene
and the little deer
In Aztec mythology and iconography, the image of the deer stands for the right foot, and it was this part of Frida’s body that was now full of pain.
you watch
you scrutinize
a human head with antlers weeping
the heart—
extract it
the pain—
isolate it
paint
the deer in the glade
the way the face separates from
the lace of the costume
the way the face seems to floaton one side on the other side
detached like that for a moment.
in the dissimulation
or the multiplication
mirrored
She paints with her heart and blood and she is adored and scorned now for it — disparaged — mocked.
worshipped adored
all the Frida icons. She smiles.
Three concerns impelled her to make art, she told a critic in 1944: her vivid memory of her own blood flowing during her childhood accident, her thoughts about birth, death and the “conducting threads” of life, and the desire to be a mother.
Running through the glade, the deer is pierced by 9 arrows.
She laughs and weeps. She winks through tears. Eyebrows like hummingbirds—hummingbirds as magic charms to bring luck in love.
confront the self one more time and look.
2 of you.
after the accident she always saw herself as two Fridas: one Frida who was dead and one who was alive.
4 quadrants
earth and sky
day and night
3 times she tried to have a child.
Fruit weeps with you.
The knife through the succulent melon paint.
foregrounded against all that encroaches. Whole
Diego don’t go
The vegetation tangle of cactus and thrusting flowers
Paint solitude.
the foliage encroaching and night
devotion
Behind the skeleton, in the middle distance, what does she see? Like the nail, sinister and threatening. Silky and yellow — yellow for illness and madness—
She sees
on a scaffold he seduces a line of actresses — her daily
hallucination
Diego!
2 Fridas
one dead Frida and observer and observed
and one who was alive
how to paint feeling
maroon fruit split open more madness and mystery
heart, heart
3 days of blood (no child)
Diego!
she paints
Even the table is wounded. And the skeleton has a broken right foot.
Stripped this time of her Tehuana costume
dressed in a man’s suit
shorn hair yellow chair
To be sung: Look if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that your hair is cropped short I don’t love you anymore.
She sits in a desolate yellow chair alone. Yellow for—
Diego, Diego.
Avenida Engaño
A tree with chopped-off branches, 20 numbered, Diego’s affairs.
Deceit Avenue
Ruin
House for birds
Nest for love.
All for nothing.
yellow chair alone.
She paints—
Paint the dress without the woman when you can’t find her
When you can’t bear it paint—
When you can’t bear it anymore
And Diego says, and Diego — he smiles with pride
“Look at her work … ascetic and tender, hard as steel and fire and delicate as a butterfly’s wing, adorable as a beautiful smile and profound and cruel as life’s bitterness.”
paint:
Bonito
paint sadness
Papa! Papa!
Do not flinch. Do not turn away — enter pain. Paint love. What the water gave you
What the language
pleasure, sadness in the afternoon and death
greenish yellow: All the phantoms wear suits of this color … or at least underclothes.
The death of my father was something terrible for me. I think that it’s owing to this that I became much less well and I grew rather thin again. You remember how handsome he was and how good?
Darling Papa, write to me here is a kiss
Self-Portrait with Bonito shows Frida in a dark blouse, wearing no jewelry or hair ornaments — Bonito who had recently died is perched on her shoulder.