Frida Kahlo

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you – Frida Kahlo

Ciekawostka: Flo posiada bunting z Fridą Kahlo (malutkie chorągiewki wieszane najczęściej w komisach samochodowych lub podczas festynów miejskich. Będąc w trasie i odwiedzając różne zakątki świata zawsze stara się znaleźć lokalne bunting.)

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a mexican painter and is one of Florence’s favourite artists. Her paintings are depicting sorrow and pain and are inspired by women’s life. More than 50 of her artworks are her autoportraits which are full of private symbolism. As Frida was saying: ‘I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.’ Her paintings were often thought to be surrealist, but she has never admitted that. ‘I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.’

Florence loves Frida’s paintings and she mentioned about them many times on her Twitter and Instagram. What’s more, she once said in the interview with Las Vegas Sun:

‘Yeah, we went downtown, we went to a vintage store. It was amazing! I managed to find a Mexican restaurant, which had all these pictures of Frida Kahlo everywhere. I am obsessed with her. It was like finding Frida. It was magical. I love her style, and I think she captured so much strength and fragility in her portraits and the quandary of being feminine and mixing up these ideas of masculine and feminine and the real and the unreal and the pain. She was an amazing artist.’

Nevertheless, the main connection between Flo and the painter is definitely the track ‘What The Water Gave Me’.  The song is titled after one of Frida’s most famous paintings titled ‘What The Water Gave Me’, in which she’s depicted lying in her bath surrounded by surreal, nightmarish imagery.

‘A lot of the time when I’m writing, things will just… appear. I was writing the song and this book on symbolism was lying around, and it had that painting on it. It’s nice to mix the ordinary with the ‘extraordinary.’

‘It’s a song for the water, because in music and art what I’m really interested in are the things that are overwhelming,” Welch said. “The ocean seems to me to be nature’s great overwhelmer. When I was writing this song, I was thinking a lot about all those people who’ve lost their lives in vain attempts to save their loved ones from drowning.’

‘It’s about water in all forms and all bodies. It’s about a lot of things; Virginia Woolf creeps into it, and of course Frida Kahlo, whose painfully beautiful painting gave me the title.’

In this case, it’s the water that has become ‘an inspiration for inspiration’ to Flo. Besides Frida, in this track you can also notice the influence of Virginia Woolf, about which you can read in another article. Water was something special for Frida, a symbol of birth. According to Gloria Orenstein, professor at the University of Southern California, ‘the theme of childbirth and [Kahlo’s] inability to have children because of her accident in her life.’ Thus to her, water was her subconscious and a womb, one that would never bear children too. For all  these women, water is this symbol of human life: the birth as well as the force taking the life away. 

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you – Frida Kahlo

Did you know that Florence has also got bunting with Frida Kahlo on it?