An Artist's Reaction to the Paintings of Frida Kahlo [and a Manifesto on 21st Century Medicine] (2007):

This series is the result of some research I conducted on Frida Kahlo while enrolled in a course called The Impact of the Mexican Revolution on Latin American Art. I felt that of all the Mexican Modernists, she is the artist with whom my current work has the greatest affiliation. My most recent series have evolved to reflect Surrealistic tendencies and a fixation on the human body. Considering the Surrealistic qualities of Kahlo’s own paintings, and the attention she devoted in her painting to her own body and medical conditions, I felt that my work would grow quite naturally in a positive direction if I emulated some of her themes and imagery.

This is a series of inkjet prints, created by digitally appropriating and re-contextualizing the 19^th century engraved commercial illustrations that I have been using in my work for several years. In my own obsession with medical grotesqueries, I seem to share Kahlo’s “black sense of humor” and “taste for the gothically shocking” (Frank Milner, Frida Kahlo, 16, 19).

In my research, I learned that Kahlo frequently referenced medical teaching texts and anatomical models for her paintings “’to explain the mechanical part of the whole business’”. So I feel that there is a coincidental correlation between her use of such imagery and my own.

This statement will detail many of the intentional and unintentional connections between Kahlo’s work and my own, but there are also many differences in our artistic motivations that can not be reconciled and should therefore be pointed out as contrasts. I admire Kahlo’s work, but I could never create sincere work that is as personally revealing hers. Kahlo’s fixation on the body was personal, and “the habit of painting was of a private nature, born out of a need for self-expression” (Terri Hardin, Frida Kahlo: A Modern Master, 5). Her work stemmed from both her Mexican and Catholic culture as well as “her own experience, which included a life of illness and several near death episodes” (Hardin, 6). I admire Mexican culture from a close distance, but as an Anglo-American regard myself as something of a cultural antithesis to Latin culture. I am fortunate that my health has always been exceptional, but I do admit to some rather idiosyncratic fascinations with the human body, pain, illness, and medical procedures. For this I can offer no explanation other than a vaguely Freudian assumption that I have been suppressing some sort of psychological trauma since my childhood which has lead me to my obsession with medical images. My work is very unlike that of Frida Kahlo in that I am making social observations rather than autobiographic statements.

From a political perspective, I do hold some very strong opinions on the nature of contemporary science and medicine. I regard my most recent work as commentary on the hypocrisies and anxieties that we collectively feel toward the scientific and medical establishment at large. As spoiled North Americans, we have been conditioned to trust in our medical system and in the marvels of modern science. Certainly, we have more reasons to be grateful for modern medicine than we can list. We do have reason to be hopeful that, if it is used properly, our lives or those of future generations will be made better with advances in medicine. Yet in our current political climate, medical science is a battlefield in which ethics go largely ignored. We must be fearful of the strange hybrids and biological catastrophes that could become realities in the near future. We must be outraged by the restrictions placed on good science and good medicine by backwards and superstitious minded individuals within our government. We must question why medical care is not distributed equally why medicine does not cut across culture or class so that all may have access to the same health. We should rise up against the wave of unchecked capitalism that turns our national healthcare system into a for-profit industry. It is utterly hypocritical that the wealthiest people undergo elective surgery to reshape body parts for reasons of pure vanity while others die slow deaths for lack of ability to pay for medical care, and yet others find themselves so deeply in debt that they must sell a kidney on the black market to keep their subsistence farms. We deny the most basic medical dignities to those whom we don’t deem important enough to bother with keeping alive, yet we use machines to keep alive people who are better off dead, all for the sake of political posturing.

Kahlo, who held mistrust for machines, believing they represented “bad luck and pain”, referenced many ominous mechanical devices in her work. I share her mistrust for, if not the machines themselves, than the institutions that use them to achieve questionable ends. I have created hybrids of human/machine/plant forms that correspond with similar themes in Kahlo’s work (as well as other Surrealists). In reading about her various surgeries, I could not help but think that the methods doctors used to mend her ailments were horrifyingly cruel, medieval, and barbaric. I do not know if more sophisticated treatments were available outside of Mexico in the early twentieth century, nor do I know if she would have been any better off physically had she been fortunate enough to live in the United States during the late 20^th/early 21^st centuries. The source imagery from the 19^th century medical texts tend to generate feelings of horrified revulsion in the viewer when one stops to contemplate the sheer barbarism early modern medicine.

The horrors of Kahlo’s medical treatments are well chronicled in both her paintings and in her diaries, where “her sketches were done automatically, with one thought following another” (Hardin, 26). Although she claimed not to have been a Surrealist, her affinity with Surrealism is well documented. “Nearly every drawing in Kahlo’s diary is spontaneous and unplanned. Kahlo’s automatic drawings were springboards to images that lurked in her unconsciousness”. (Sarah Lowe, Essay in The Diary of Frida Kahlo, 27). Many describe her paintings and preliminary sketches as a flow of consciousness. I believe my own manner of creative image making has Surrealist (and Dadaist) tendencies as well. My creative process is one of looking at, responding to, selecting, combining and arranging of pre-existing forms. I cannot say that it is purely automatic since I do put conscious thought into it, but the initial decision making process is as automatic and instinctive as is possible when scanning and digital imaging is involved.

From Kahlo’s work I drew many ideas for my own series of images. Kahlo’s fascination with her own body is paralleled with my interest in the human body in general and women’s relationships to their bodies in particular. There is a juxtaposition of machinery and the organic in both her work and mine. Kahlo associated the mechanical with unpleasantries, organic with things that are pleasant. I feel my views are somewhat opposite, since much that is organic repulses me, and I see machines as clean and sterile and having the potential for good. It is the people using the machines that I do not trust! In both her work and mine, there are repeated references to machines and internal organs (or as reflected in my sketchbook: machines + guts). My work, however is more outward looking than inward. I don’t attempt to chronicle my life. I point out societal hypocrisies relevant to everyone who lives in this world with me at this time.

Formally, I have attempted to emulate Kahlo’s colors and color symbolism (such as yellow = madness, sickness, and fear) by literally sampling digitally from reproductions of her work. I have also arranged many of my compositions in her retablo style, using detached body parts in the manner of ex-votos. I have specifically attempted to make use of the inside/outside viewpoints of the human body, as well as the above ground/below ground points of view and strange floating forms.  Her diagrammatic and schematic representation of supposedly objective images appeals to me since I am intrigued by the lack of objectivity in the hand-illustrated 19^th century medical texts.

An unintentional side benefit to this is that my images suggest the kitschy Loteria playing cards found in many Mexican markets and households.

I do not feel that my work is in any way straight mimicry of Kahlo’s ideas or images. The greatest difference between Kahlo’s work and my own is the evidence of her personal story in each painting and the absence of mine in nearly all of my work. While my personal opinions, political views, and subconscious idiosyncrasies are always evident, my actual life story is completely missing. Nevertheless, I realized an overlap between much of her imagery and my own, so I followed it in a way that I felt would benefit my art without distracting it from the direction it was already taking. I feel I have succeeded in this effect. I regard the attached series of ten images as the beginning of a much larger series in which these ideas are more thoroughly explored.  While omitting my personal story, I assume the role of a social commentator who is saddened that Kahlo’s dreams that Marxism Will Give Heath to the Sick have yet to be realized.