When Frida Kahlo writes your Morning Pages
Yes, they do have to be first thing in the morning. You have to shut up and get out of the way. Write with a needle in your vein. Use the sharp, draw the blood. It’s not meant to be pretty. But don’t make any particular effort to make it raw, either. The art will do the making, you just need to lie there ready with the needle in your vein.
Be ready to follow unexpected trails to places where you never meant to go. Expect the prompt you resisted to hit the motherlode. Expect the artist from a place, a time, a culture, a situation you couldn’t begin to imagine, to speak the most directly to you.
I thought it would be fun to do a prompt challenge on women artists. I’d been beating myself up a bit over my lack of creativity. When I first got my breast cancer diagnosis, back in January, a flood of poetry had followed. Then things stalled, and I began to focus on getting through chemotherapy. But the itch to start creating something again was there, and I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was my usual habit of beating myself up, or something deeper.
So, to the challenge. Lori Siebert’s CupFULL2022 , which offers you an eclectic list of artists and invites you to make a cup celebrating each one. I heard of most of them, but I Googled up a couple and it would be cool to have a play, maybe tickle my creative fancy with a few pretty new art supplies, get a little book from Etsy and make it into an Instagram project.
The first was Frida Kahlo. I decided I’d skip over that. I don’t do Mexican, I don’t do self-portraits, particularly women with thick eyebrows (like mine) and a forbidding, direct stare, who paint their mutilated bodies with their heart hanging out, and what the heck is that monkey meant to be symbolising, anyway? I realise now that I was reacting, at least partly, to the merchandised Kahlo images you see all over the place on drinks bottles, phone cases, etc. Not to the woman who painted flat on her back when all else failed, who sat stiff and forbidding because of agonising spinal injury.
By the way, she reminded me, that was only the second worst accident of my life. The first was Diago Rivera.
What had started as a late-night clickthrough became a lot more. I read, and I scrolled, and I thought, “Holy guacomole, that’s a bit weird,” and then I went off to bed with my head full of Twitter and how useless I felt because I have cancer, and maybe it will turn out to be terminal even though that seems improbable right now, and I’ll do some big noble thing at the last minute because nothing scares me any more, like the old guy in Ikiru.
Or maybe not. I went off to bed.
And at 3.00 Frida woke me up, and said, I want you downstairs, writing, now. She proceeded to smack me upside the head a bit. I don’t say this casually, I don’t go around expecting creative icons to speak personally to me, particularly when I haven’t asked them to because they scare me. It’s the very unlikeliness of this encounter than makes me so certain it’s for real.
Excuse me, she said, you seem to think you have a problem making art because you’re sick when the two women who inspired you most yesterday were both in a hospital bed (The other one was Suleika Jaouad whose Substack “Isolation Journals” came similarly out of nowhere and stayed with me).
Of all the people I had ever expected to read the Riot Act to me, the last one had to be Frida Kahlo - she looks way too fierce, I don’t speak Spanish and I am not planning on any self-portraits. Why, only yesterday, I was joining a prompt thread about mirrors.
Oh. Right, okay, you win that round, Frida.
By the way, she added, you would not believe how much I hate those phone cases, and don’t get me started on the trays and the biscuit tins.
Thanks for checking out my stuff last night. Did you notice how in those few images I covered sexual violence, miscarriage, lactation, the border that killed 50 people in a baking lorry last week, medical procedures, broken spines and most of all, PAIN?. I think you have some writing to do, and here’s a poem on me to get you going
FRIDA’S DANCE
The cup of my being broke open
two pelvic halves along my shattered spine
and from the ruins grew a vine
a seed cracks concrete if it must
It’s not about wellness
it’s all about pain
Art is the needle that enters the vein
From my bed I’ve travelled universes
If the corset forces you to sit unbending, deck your head
make offerings to your ancestors
from your own dignity
You will make art in emergency
with all that is available,
it is the machine that keeps you alive
use your own body
do it now
do not wait to tidy the studio up
do not search for a meaning
a moment
a sign
You speak for women yet unborn
It is your body
It will dance
so you’d better get out of its way
You’re welcome. See you around.
Oh, and by the way, you might want to reconsider that bullet journal supplies subscription. Because that isn’t art, it’s consumerism. And you’re using it to stay small.