Last year I painted my friend Jane Ruby as Frida Kahlo, showing Jane with her pets the way Frida also posed with her animals. Jane
Jane Ruby as Frida Kahlo
and I talked about Frida and her life, and about the physical pain that the artist endured after a horrid accident in her teens. Jane also suffers severe back and neck pain, and shares a love of all things bright, colourful and Mexican.
When the Female Iconography show was being planned, I decided to do another homage to Frida Kahlo. This time I portrayed myself
and my aunt Ruth.
My aunt Ruth was born in 1917. She was 16 years older than my father. I have a large collection of photographs of Ruth’s life. She travelled the world, spoke Spanish fluently, and enjoyed dressing up, much the way many of my friends dress up nowadays. In this painting I have taken elements of Ruth’s life, and of Frida’s paintings, as well as my own life. The composition is mainly “The Two Fridas”. I have added the sun and the moon (day and night) from other Kahlo paintings. The monkey was one of Frida’s pets, as was the parrot.
Frida often portrayed her physical pain in her paintings. I have put in a painful foot operation. I have included elements of the feminine and masculine, as Frida herself possessed both qualities, openly having affairs with women as well as men. My aunt Ruth sometimes wore men’s suits. She never married, yet no one ever suggested what the reason for that might be.
In her hand Ruth holds a portrait of Frida herself. Mexico was a frequent travel spot for Ruth, although the background in this painting is from a photograph of Ruth in Alhambra. It was a black and while photograph; I have invented the colour.
The hairpieces on both myself and Ruth come from different Frida paintings. The little girl on my head is my daughter Lucy, shown in the way Frida often depicted her husband Diego in her paintings, always “on her mind”. In total I reference about 8 of Kahlo’s works in this picture.
Self Portrait with my Aunt Ruth as the Two Fridas
And last but not least, the far background shows a landscape of city and country. This is about Frida but also refers to other paintings I have done. Frida had to often live with Diego in American cities while missing her beloved Mexico. Behind me is the Dorset countryside where I got married, and where I one day might like to settle down. Behind Ruth is a picture of the house in Philadelphia where she lived for most of her life. Ruth left exciting and dramatic photographs of her travels. But her day to day life was a different picture, staying in the same tiny run-down house in the slums of north Philadelphia, living with her mother until her mother died, and then staying on in the same house until her own passing in 1985. The buildings on either side are now boarded up; when my family used to visit Ruth the neighbourhood was a melee of gangs and noise. Tragedy often is found underlying beauty, a fact portrayed again and again in the paintings of Frida Kahlo.
Some of the Frida Kahlo paintings referenced:
“The Two Fridas” 1939
“Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)” 1943
“Self Portrait with Monkey” 1948
“What the water gave me” 1938
“Self portrait” 1940
“The Tree of Hope” 1946
“Monkey and Parrot” 1942
