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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.