My Dress Hangs Here
from the Tate Modern

Last Sunday my sister, Kris, and I took the ferry into San Francisco to catch the last day of the Frida Kahlo show at the SF Moma. Nothing like waiting until the last minute. The show was there all summer, but for some reason, we never could get out act together to go see it. When I went to get tickets online a few days before, it was sold out, and I thought we’d missed our chance. But when I checked again on Saturday, they had released tickets, so I bought a pair for 5:30. We really didn’t want to go that late, but we figured it would be better than not going at all. Then, Sunday morning, I checked for tickets again, and they had released a lot more. I bought tix for the 3:00 viewing, and then we sold the 5:30 ones when we got to the museum. By then it was sold out again, and the couple who bought them seemed pretty grateful to get the tickets.

Henry Ford Hospital
from Art Archive

The whole point of buying advance tickets at half hour intervals was for crowd control. We were still crammed inside the gallery rooms; not recommended for claustrophobes. I can’t imagine what the experience would have been like if they had just allowed unlimited access. Some of Kahlo’s paintings are very small and detailed, such as Henry Ford Hospital. Everyone, myself included, wants to get right in there and look at all the amazing details. This painting was done with oil on metal. It was the first significant painting in the collection and we formed a line along the wall behind it, patiently waiting our turns. Okay, some people weren’t so patient. I was behind a lady with a stroller and an adorable crying baby. I felt like I’d been waiting a long time and still we weren’t making any progress. Then I notice, people behind us are deciding to walk around us and squeeze in front of us to see the painting. It reminded me of that aggravation you feel when you know your lane is going to merge on the freeway and so you pull over only to have a hundred cars zip by and squish themselves in at the last minute which can alternately make you feel like a sucker and a fool. Those of you who take Highway 37 from Marin to Vallejo and have to make that merge just after Lakeville Road on a busy Friday afternoon will know exactly what I’m talking about. But who am I to say what correct etiquette is in the museum? After all, no one said we had to walk through the exhibit like people waiting for a Disney ride. Okay, so I digress. I continually had to remind myself to take deep breaths and relax so as not to be engulfed with road rage, I mean museum-goer rage.

A Few Small Nips
from Art Archive

But I guess if you’re going to let your emotions get the best of you, a Frida Kahlo exhibit would be a good place to do it. Her paintings overflow with raw passion, and most of it is pretty dark. A Few Small Nips was painted after she found out that her sister had been having an affair with Frida’s philandering husband, Diego Rivera, for over a year. Our little tour brochure said, “Kahlo later confided to a friend that she had decided to paint this scene because she sympathized with the dead woman, since she herself [Frida] had come close to being ‘murdered by life.'” There’s so much pain in this picture that the murdered woman’s bloodstains can not be contained on the canvas and spill over onto the simple wooden frame.

The Broken Column
from Zoe Brigley’s Blog

In fact, Frida never really lets you turn away from her pain, and I think that’s why so many people are drawn to her art. Her paintings are very narrative. When I see them, I feel like I’m being allowed into the soul of her life. I almost want to avert my eyes, but not quite. Through her art, she allows me to be a voyeur to her personal struggles and suffering. She once said, “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” I love The Broken Column because she paints her strength and her vulnerabilities. Tears stream from onto her cheeks and the background is bleak and barren, but she still shows her sense of determination as well as her sexual power.

Self Portrait – 1930
from The New York Times

Frida said that she painted herself because she was always alone and because she knew herself the best. This self portrait is my favorite among the many that she did. I think that it is in this painting that she allows her real beauty to shine through. Her delicate features, her rosy cheeks and lips, the intricate jeweled orb earrings and the simple hairstyle and dress, seem to depict her at a time when she was healthy and happy. In 1930, one year after marrying Rivera, she moved with him to San Francisco where Rivera had been commissioned to paint two murals. But it was also in 1930, that Frida was forced to have an abortion because of a pelvic abnormality resulting from the bus crash she experienced in 1925.

Frida said in 1938, “I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any consideration.” How fortunate I am to have been able to see her amazing art work here, and how fortunate we are all that she painted what was in her head as well as in her heart.

For a nice slide show of photographs and paintings, take a look at The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo.

Those of you who have been reading my blog over the past few years may remember that my mom died two years ago – May 22, 2006 from Alzheimer’s. The summer before she died she spent a lot of her time outside in the garden creating little portraits of nature. She would line up seed pods, pine needles, dried-up flower heads. She would organize twigs, dirt clods, and flower petals. Very little escaped her artistic eye. Two pieces of milky white glass became juxtaposed with a wood chip; a row of tiny rocks stretched for two and a half feet in the coarse red soil. Shriveling succulent leaves were lined-up like soldiers along the edge of the walkway.

Unfortunately, Mom’s seemingly endless organizing of objects annoyed us quite a bit. She would crouch in the hot Sacramento sun, refusing to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, wear a hat or do any of the sensible things that we asked of her. She would spread out her plant fragments across tables where we needed to sit and eat and become angry with us when we swept them into a box to clean up.

Thankfully, by chance or luck, I saw something beautiful in what she was doing, and I started to photograph her little designs whenever I could. I was at her house almost every weekend that summer, and I was always excited to see what she had created while I was gone. Sometimes her artwork was easily spotted near the front door or in the middle of a lawn chair. Other times I had to go a little further into the garden – beneath the peach tree, in the wet dirt, or near a favorite plant – to find them. I tried not to let her see me taking pictures; I’d wait until she went into the house or took a nap, and then I’d run around to all the spots I’d seen and take pictures as fast as I could before she came outside again.

I felt sneaky and excited about what I was capturing, but I never felt that it would end, that she would stop making them. Of course she eventually did, and I forgot about the pictures as her condition worsened and we had to concern ourselves with doing things to keep her alive, like coaxing her to take a few sips of water or a few bites of pudding.

She would sleep in the lounge chair in the dining room, and I, exhausted but afraid to leave her alone in case she woke up and needed me, would sleep on the carpeted floor with a balled-up sweatshirt as a pillow. Sometimes I would wake up and see her awake too, and watching me. And she would smile, and I would remind her of who I was.

Last Christmas I finally took all the pictures I had taken and organized them and made a movie of them using iMovie. There were over a hundred images, so the process was a bit daunting. But going through them made me feel close to her again. I worked on fade-ins and fade-outs and scan and pan settings. This was my first time using iMovie, so I made a lot of mistakes as I worked to get things just right. I added just the right music and burned the movie on cds for my sisters, dad, and aunts. We watched it together at Christmas on my dad’s super big TV.

I don’t know what kind of reaction I expected from my dad, but I didn’t anticipate how emotional he became. I felt bad that I had brought up all these feelings again and I hugged him and apologized. But he told me that he was grateful. He had never realized that I was photographing these things and he said that he never saw them as art, the way I had. It made him sad to realize that he hadn’t appreciated what my mom was doing that summer. But how could he? He was just trying to cope with her illness and keep her healthy for as long as he could.

If you’d like to see the movie, just click on link below and it will open in a new window. The movie is just over fourteen minutes long and can take quite a while to load, so go get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine while you wait. The first time I tried to play it over the Internet I thought it wasn’t working and almost gave up. I started doing some drawing and suddenly I heard the first song start to play, and there was the movie, playing on my computer.

I hadn’t watched the film since December, and even though I watched it at least fifty times as I put it together, I still find it difficult to watch without hurting inside a little bit. Of course I still miss my mom a lot. But some days go by when I don’t, and I try not to let myself feel bad about that.

The reason why I wanted to share this movie I made with all of you is because so many of us have parents, brothers, sisters with this awful illness of Alzheimer’s. Maybe one of them is creating something beautiful and you can’t see it through your sadness and despair and the day to day struggle to survive. We get so busy taking care of this person we love who is disappearing before us, that we forget to see the little joys that might just be found in some tiny thing that person is doing and that we discount because of his or her illness.

In the little cd booklet I made to go along with this movie, I wrote: . . . Mom’s love of nature and her artistic impulses outlasted most of her other memories, even her memory of me. I believe that these portraits of small, fragile, often overlooked fragments of nature were her last great gifts to us. I want to share those gifts with whoever is willing to accept them.

Click here to see the movie.

Music:
“Dante’s Prayer” by Loreena McKennitt
“Watermark” by Enya
“Breathe Me” by Sia