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65506
65506
Mr. Pagtakhan
1’ Honors Sophomore English
March 4, 2014
Painting A Silver Lining
There is no way she should be alive. All around her, screams and shouts rattle the air; sparks fly from broken wires and sharp sirens cut through the chaos as ambulances race to the scene. Behind her, two people lay dead. And when her boyfriend pulls her out from where she is trapped under the wreckage of the bus crash, he sees that an iron handrail has pierced her abdomen, entering her left hip and exiting between her legs. At the hospital, doctors only find more and more damage: a broken collarbone, a crushed foot, a spine fractured in three places. They expect her to die on the operating table.
When she wakes up, she is in a full body cast, with strict instructions to remain in bed for at least five months. It will take her another two years to recover. In the midst of all this tragedy, however, inspiration strikes the eighteen-year old in the form of a small mirror that her mother places directly above her bed, where she can look at herself while resting. During her recovery from one of the most horrific events of her life, a teenaged Frida Kahlo picks up her paintbrush for the first time, and begins a journey that will lead to her being hailed as one of the most accomplished painters of all time. Because Frida Kahlo was born into a unique and influential time period, was given multiple opportunities unusual for girls of her time, and was able to begin refining her artistry and technique at a young age, allowing her to earn ten thousand hours of practice, she was able to overcome the physical and emotional setbacks of her early life through art and achieve success in the art world and beyond.
Since Kahlo was born during a period of ideological and political change in Mexico, she was given a unique worldview that contributed to the success of her artwork. She was born in 1907, three years before the Mexican Revolution began (Milner 6). After the revolution ended, the new leaders of Mexico decided to sponsor artists to create a new national identity, which greatly increased their status in the eyes of the public (Block). The fact that Kahlo was born during this time allowed her greater freedom to pursue her interests in the arts than she would have received at any other time, as well as greater public support for her choice. Growing up, she never experienced any of the stigma now often associated with people who choose to be professional artists, and therefore was free to concentrate on her passion without any misgivings. The years after the revolution were also a time of governmental, economical, and social progress as well (Flores). Innumerable ideas about foreign policy, government, and culture were growing in popularity, but these ideas often clashed with one another, creating a contradictory and sometimes confusing mix between the old order and the new (Milner 6). Frank Milner posits that this is one of the inspirations behind Kahlo’s paintings, these contradictory elements that reveal both progress and tradition. Because Kahlo had the fortune to be born during this time period, she received the influences from the Mexican Revolution that inspired so many of her works and which led to them being remembered years later. As she grew older, art continued to develop at an astounding rate; for example, the 1920s are widely considered to be a sort of “renaissance” for Mexican artists, with a dramatic increase in fields as varied as graphic arts, murals, and art education (Flores). At the same time, two other ideas–Communism and “Indignesimo”–were gaining popularity in Mexico as well (Barnet-Sanchez). Marxism was common in Mexico at the time, and Kahlo would join the party in the 1920s (Grimberg). The ideology and symbols of the philosophy would also come to play major roles in her pieces, especially later in life. (ibid). “Indignesimo” was an appropriation of indigenous peoples’ symbols and culture that also had an extremely large effect on Kahlo’s art, especially the culture of the Aztec peoples of northern Mexico (Barnet-Sanchez). Kahlo’s distinctive art style drew from all of these influences, and as a result, she was able to distinguish herself from the other artists of her generation. Because of her advantages in time and place, Kahlo easily found inspiration in her surroundings for all her paintings.
While many female artists of her time were discriminated against in comparison to male artists, Kahlo was given multiple unique opportunities that allowed her to pursue her interests in painting. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he asserts that
Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”…[A] little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a little bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still–and on and on until [there is] a genuine outlier. [They] didn’t start out as an outlier. [They] started out just a little bit better.
In examining Kahlo’s life, it is clear that she received multiple rare opportunities that eventually led to her success. Her parents enrolled her in the National Preparatory School, one of the most progressive schools in the country, at a young age, where she was one of only a handful of girls who attended (Milner 6). While at the school, she joined a group called Las Cucachas (the Caps), which discussed politics, culture, and books (Barnet-Sanchez). Both these opportunities allowed her to learn about differing ideas and expand her horizons, while also giving her an opportunity to develop her own ideas in a safe, accepting environment from a young age–ideas that would eventually be incorporated into her works of art. Furthermore, her being a woman gave her a different perspective on her subjects than her male classmates had, letting her stand out early on due to the lack of women in the art field. As a student, she also met the famous muralist Diego Rivera–the man who she would eventually marry twice–who told her she had talent and encouraged her to continue painting (Barnet-Sanchez). After her marriage to Rivera, she was given multiple opportunities to travel to countries that commissioned murals from her husband, including the US (Block). While there, her distaste with American culture and “hedonism,” as she saw it, helped solidify her own identity as a woman of mixed European and indigenous roots and embrace the culture that influenced her painting style (ibid). The myriad opportunities she received that led to Kahlo being able to develop her ideas and gain new inspiration or motivation played an enormous part in her final success as a painter.
Since Kahlo began practicing her painting early in life, she became a master of her craft at a young age. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses a study conducted by Anders Ericsson using students at the Berlin Academy of Music, where he discovered that all of the top musicians there had practiced their craft at least 10,000 hours over the course of their lives. Based on this information, Gladwell proposes a “10,000 hour rule,” which states that to be considered a master at a skill, one must practice it for at least 10,000 hours. In Kahlo’s case, she grew interested in the arts at a young age, as her father was a photographer and she spent long hours in his studio, assisting him with his work (Milner 8). Her father was also supportive of all her passions, including art, and was a source of encouragement for the young developing artist (Comisarenco). Her father’s profession gave her early exposure to different art forms, as well as teaching her basic composition and other art techniques, while her support system gave her the environment and motivation she needed to pursue her passions at a young age and begin working toward her 10,000 hour goal. The biggest step towards mastery, however, came disguised as a curse. At age eighteen, she was involved in a bus crash that left her unable to have children and permanently crippled (Milner 8). It was during her convalescence period, though, that she first began to paint–first, self portraits using the small mirror above her bed, and then branching out into different subjects (ibid). During the five months she spent bedridden, Kahlo painted obsessively and constantly, seeing art as a method of expressing the physical pain her body was wracked with (ibid). Devoting five months to solely painting is a luxury that few artists can ever receive–but for Kahlo, though it came at a heavy price, the extra practice time it allowed was one of the key factors in her becoming a master of painting so early. All of the opportunities in Kahlo’s life helped her reach 10,000 hours of painting practice at a young age, leading to her early mastery of her craft.
Because Frida Kahlo’s paintings are expressions of her true emotions and opinions about politics and society, they have continued to influence the art world today. During a time when women were marginalized and stereotyped by society, Kahlo strove to create a full portrait of herself through art (Barnet-Sanchez). Many of her self-portraits reflect darker, less polished versions of herself, rejecting the image of women as innocent, gentle mothers and wives that was commonly held at the time. Furthermore, although her paintings often portrayed her internal turmoil and struggle, they are not passive reflections of her pain; instead, she actively chooses to portray herself as such (Garber). This allowed her to gain a sort of control over her pain, by choosing when and how to release it, and in what form. The freedom Kahlo felt as an artist was greatly linked to the time she was born in–the Mexican Revolution, where artists were respected and sponsored by the government, not mocked–and her liberal education, where she participated in multiple clubs such as Las Cucachas that allowed her to learn to express herself freely. As a whole, her paintings have come to represent courage in the face of tragedy, political devotion, atheism and religion, and sadness and black humor (Barnet-Sanchez). Some of the best examples are her still life paintings, which are melancholy and yet filled with a sense of hope nonetheless. One of her final works, which she painted only a few months before she died, was titled “Long Live Life,” and depicted a cut watermelon in the foreground, with the eponymous words carved into it. Even right before her death, she was hopeful enough to express these views about the beauty and joy of life.
Because of Frida Kahlo’s unique inspirations due to time and place, the opportunities she was given at a young age, and the large amount of time she spent refining her talent, she is remembered today as one of the foremost artists of the 20th century. Accepting that artists’ success is still dependent on outside factors can be difficult–after all, it is easy to imagine that they just have more innate ability than the rest of society. But Frida Kahlo’s success is just as much a function of the amazing opportunities she was given as the work and passion she put into it. Every painting she created had its roots in hundreds of hours of working with her father in the photography studio, reading Marxist ideology, watching revolutionary-era Mexico unfold around her, and lying in bed with only a paintbrush, a mirror, and a head full of ideas. If Frida Kahlo teaches one lesson about success, it is that in the end, nobody springs from nothingness–even artists, after all, must have a canvas to paint on before they can create.
Works Cited
Anderson, Corrine. "Remembrance of an Open Wound: Frida Kahlo and Post-Revolutionary Mexican Identity." JSTOR, n.d. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
Barnet-Sanchez, Holly. "Frida Kahlo: Her Life and Art Revisited." JSTOR, 1997. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
Block, Rebecca, and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep. "Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo in ‘Gringolandia.'" JSTOR, 1998. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
Comisarenco, Dina. "Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Tlazolteotl." JSTOR, n.d. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
Flores, Tatiana. "Strategic Modernists: Women Artists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico." JSTOR, n.d. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
Garber, Elizabeth. “Art Critics on Frida Kahlo: A Compilation of Feminist and Non-Feminist Voices.” JSTOR, n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2014.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and, 2008. Print.
Grinberg, Salomon. "Frida Kahlo's Still Lifes: 'I Paint Flowers So They Will Not Die.'" JSTOR, 2004. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
Milner, Frank. Frida Kahlo. London: PRC, 1990. Print.