Carole Maso - Beauty is Convulsive - The Passion of Frida Kahlo

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.

paint:

the recumbent Frida — deep incisions in her back

the seated Frida holding court and corset and scorn.

Their criticisms, gossip, recriminations

in the demeaning, in the mean-spirited

“Unregenerate junkie,” apply layers of disdain, “nymphomaniac, suicidal, alcoholic, self-dramatizing, narcissist” Easy for you to say

And she is dying posthumously one more time in their scorn … martyr bordered, la misericorda.

Papa!

holding the yellow flower that the Aztecs associated with death and that decorate graves all over Mexico.

Her magic numbers, talismans — to ward off any more

the internal lyrical motives that impelled her

All the things she loved

her characteristic small slow affectionate strokes

Diego

She paints on the smoothness of metal — touch, touch and gently with her meticulous brush

the skin of the fruit, tree, rock, stream

I feel you

all is alive I feel you

the miracle of her touch with paint

her pain in paint

Heart, uterus, breasts, spine

longing, longing, she paints

intestines — the valves up close

blood through

trembling

smallest of brushes like eyelashes on skin

she trembles

every hair stands up

painting fur

the tenderness of her touch

a parrot, a small dog

skin of water, fruit, birds

softness — the velvet curtain

the folds of dress

one foot in oblivion—

love me a little

and she feels with her eyes the water all over her

and she paints, the flatness of rock, the texture of feather and tree

the exposed heart

roots, veins

If you could feel what I feel.

Drops of mother’s milk, drops of blood, the weeping fruit

She feels in her the motion

And I am painting the skin of my body—

my pain

with a small brush

something so dear

with reverence.

a touch like no other

There is no artist in Mexico that can compare with her, he says.

The blood pumping of the heart, the severed valves, hurt, love. Your blood flows up into the distant mountains and down into the sea, chasm, the red delta, red river, fluid, brutal poetry of blood and broken

green: warm and good light

cobalt blue: electricity and purity. Love

she feels in her the joy, the yellow pulsing mystery madness

She feels in her the music, voices, pictures, sings.

drawn to the swirling

vibrant, magnetic, Diego, the way color

pulses—

the way—

color comes and goes

She feels in her the alegría

She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing.

the way color keeps

the way color has always kept

drawn to the swirling

the way the line redeems

consoles sometimes.

the way — broken

impassive, furious, anguished—

the torso split paint

without flinching

steel corset

breaking apart

Diego why?

ionic column

answer me.