Frida's Florals: Defiance in Bloom
When asked, “What kind of flower are you?” because I have whimsical friends and coworkers who insisted on so-called “icebreaker” questions, I used to give the same answer: a single red rose - clean, pristine, rich in color, associated with romance and carefully cultivated perfection. And while I am still fond of a red rose, lately I have been returning to the wild places within myself, the ones that grew before all of life’s well-intentioned but not always wise gardeners came to tame and pinch and prune and shape my spirit into something well-behaved and demure and never angry or out of line.
And now I know that I am the entire field of wildflowers - pinks and yellows and purples and greens, weeds and bugs and bees and all, growing out of rich soil under a wide, blue, sun-soaked sky.
I think Frida would say that she was the entire Mexican jungle.
Frida Kahlo remains one of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth century, and not only for her bold gaze (and eyebrows). A fierce champion of the Mexican Independence movement, celebrated on September 16th, Frida’s life (1907 - 1954) has been admired and studied through various lenses: disability advocacy, gender identity, masc-fem presentation, the tortured artist trope, and the independent woman caught in heartbreaking love triangles with her infamously philandering husband and muralist Diego Rivera.
But I keep coming back to Frida because she understands pain. Restriction. Heartache. Disappointment. Joy. Color. Ferocity. Hope. In short, she understands the confusing alchemy of beauty, sorrow, and determination that melt together to forge the soul.
Today, I want to look specifically at Frida’s florals, a hallmark of her chosen affinity with the Tehuantepec region and its matriarchs, the Tehuana, whose colorful dress (traje) and distinctive accessories like bright flower crowns instantly set them apart. Frida’s own color-block skirts, lace shirts, and braided locks hearken to the Tehuana as beautiful, powerful embodiments of a pre-Columbian, pre-Spanish past in Mexico. Many of her self portraits feature this distinctive dress and frame her within backgrounds of closely growing vines, tree boughs, and an assortment of animal companions who visually recall the wild, untamed, uncolonized expanses of the Americas.
One would be forgiven, on first glance, for thinking that Frida’s use of the festive floral crown was meant to inspire associations of femininity, softness, and gentleness, a counterbalance perhaps to the wildness she painted elsewhere. On the contrary, these barely contained organic forms are nothing short of the helmet she wore into battle. The art of flower arrangement and its use in female adornment is well-documented across cultures and time periods, but Frida’s crowns are not a statement of her domination over nature - rather, they signal that Nature herself, uncolonized, untamed nature, is coming to Frida’s, to Mexico’s aid. Think of how eye-catching, how distinctive, how bold such a crown would be in a place like New York City, which Frida visited several times. Amid the concrete jungle and its endless mechanistic churning, she stood proudly as a daughter-warrior of the earth.
Bold reds and yellows interspersed with verdant greens have lives and minds of their own as they sinuously wrap around Frida’s face in her self-portraits, or else perch atop her head complacently, happy to be of service for the moment as a beacon to others: look at us and see that we are bright, and daring, and that we are heralding a return to the old ways, they seem to say.
Frida also painted many animal companions, some of them her real-life pets, onto her canvases. One that has always caught my eye and heart especially is her self-portrait as a hunted deer. “The Wounded Deer,” painted in 1946, depicts Frida’s head on the body of a deer pierced with nine arrows, a number said to have negative connotations in association with the Mexica (pronounce meh-shee-kah, more widely known as “Aztec”) calendar. Clearly a study of pain - physical, cerebral, and spiritual - this Frida nevertheless stares boldly out at the viewer, as she does in so many of her paintings, simultaneously seeming to ask for, and yet defying, our pity. A martyred saint hardly appears to have more stalwart resignation in the face of utter destruction.
Frida suffered from physical pain for her entire life, first from having polio as a child, then due to a traumatic trolley car crash at eighteen. Her doctors later noted that she also likely suffered from spina bifida, and her multiple miscarried pregnancies were further casualties of her body’s difficulty in healing from these maladies. More difficult, though, than the physical trauma her body endured was that of her psyche. She recounts in heartbreaking, yet sober words how the trolley accident ripped her girlish “world of colors” from her. Frida’s relationship with pain, suffering, and death are clearly studied, expressed, even celebrated at times in her works. When we get a little closer to the Dia de los Muertos in November, I will examine this part of her work more closely.
But today, in homage to Frida’s strength, spirit, and creative force of nature, I’m making my own headdress inspired by the traje de Tehuana - a mixture of bright florals, lively greens, and crowning antlers (thank you to a talented seller on Etsy who 3D-printed these for me). These elements combine to express my own interplay with the life-affirming and the sorrowful that we all encounter and dance with in this world.
The deer’s antlers remind me to stand tall and proud, even in the midst of life’s harshest pains, and the flowers whisper, Bloom, child. Bloom.
Comments