Her artwork is about her life and the experiences and obstacles she went through due to her accident, culture, fantasies and bisexuality. She painted herself with no emotion on her face because she painted the way she used to see herself on a mirror, but she always painted herself wearing Mexican clothing, colorful hair ornaments and leaves representing life. On almost all of her paints she had plants which represent life, animals as cats or monkeys which represent promiscuity and in her case, her desire to become a mother. She had an obsession with fertility and babies. So she painted herself image when she had one of their miscarriages.
Unfortunately, most of those "life events" were tragic and unpleasant events that brought much pain to her life. In the article, Neurological Deficits in the Life and Works of Frida Kahlo, Valmantas Budrys tells readers that “it is difficult to find an artist whose life and works were more deeply affected by illness than Frida Kahlo’s” (Budrys 1). Often when Frida was upset, she would paint a self-portrait to express her emotions at the time. Most of Frida's self-portraits look like just another self-portrait. However, within her paintings are clues that reveal her inner emotions and thoughts at the time the painting was executed.
I’ve been curious about Georgia O’Keeffe, since my second job in the 80’s when it was popular to sell Nagel, Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe prints. “O’Keeffe’s landscapes and still life’s are among the most reproduced paintings in popular media” (Carlin, 2009). I always wondered what O’Keeffe was thinking about while she was painting, since all I saw was sexual imagery disguised as flowers. Many art critics came to the same conclusion, which Georgia adamantly denied, but a few critics state she accentuates the sexuality within each object. Georgia insisted the abstract sexual imagery was in the eye of the beholder, and not her intention.
All of her paintings were from personal experiences such as her marriage, miscarriages and her numerous operations. Out of Kahlo’s 143 paintings 55 are self portraits. Over her bed was a mirror so she could see herself and this was how she produced the self portraits. I admire the way which she paints her portraits as she never tries to beautify herself as many would, in fact she seems to make herself appear uglier. ‘They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t, I never painted my dreams, I painted my reality’.
The ‘Weeping Woman’ was part of a series based on Picasso’s many muses and lovers. In this series Picasso did not use a certain style; the series is more of a patchwork of differing styles, the series depicts Picasso’s many lovers and muses, all of whom are weeping much like in Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ as there is a woman cradling a child’s body crying in the same style as ‘Weeping Woman’ with both eyes on the same side of the face and distorted, almost twisted features, though ‘Guernica’
30 August 2014. In “Girl Before a Mirror,” Pablo Picasso uses cubism and contrasting colors to create a pessimistic tone to illustrate the duality of the woman’s nature. The painter uses simple shapes and lines to create the body of the woman, but he remains successful at displaying her both in side profile and frontally as she peers into a mirror that reflects a woman she is not. In reality, she is a beautiful pregnant woman with perky, round breasts and small eyes. As she stares at her reflection, she sees herself as an old woman, whose young body has been distorted and gravity has taken its rightful place, creating a self pity attitude.
Her eyes are blacked out and her lips are voluptuous and red. The feminine soft hues of pinks and peaches led me to believe that there was a body in the center of this art piece. Why would Snyder place this woman in the middle just to cover her up? It made me feel as if the woman within the painting was being overlooked and then I questioned myself, “Did Snyder feel overlooked in her life?” If that was the case, in what aspects of her life did she feel overlooked? I then wondered if that was her, trapped in her own mind or trapped in a society that did not view her as an equal, which
The exhibition was divided into three sections: the prostitutes of La Merced, the disappeared woman of Juarez, and the witches or better known as curanderas of the north. Coming from a Mexican background myself, these are topics I was already familiar with but had never experience or seen in ways the Artist presented to the public. Each section caught my attention in a different manner. The prostitutes of La Merced presented photographs that made me really uncomfortable and confused. The women in the photographs are not the typical thin bodied, long hair, young age girls I would think men would seek.
The three tears could also be interpreted as tears of pain and suffering in which she has endured. As Frida once said “I suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down… the other accident is Diego”. The detached head of Diego that is perched above Khalo’s dark mono-brow suggests that he was always on her mind and by the inclusion of the third eye it could represent Khalo’s admiration towards Diego and his wisdom. “Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird” is another example of Khalo’s self-portraits
You can tell that Frida’s art work, as well as Elisa’s Chrysanthemums were the biggest and most important part of their lives. Frida had a very noticeable masculine side. She was bi-sexual, she smoked cigars and drank alcohol, which was something many women around the 1960’s never really did. She also cheated on her husband habitually which both males and females. She also painted a self-portrait of herself dressed as a man.