“I paint flowers so they will not die.” ― Frida Kahlo
“I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.” ― Frida Kahlo
“pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence”
― Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait
KEEP SCROLLING DOWN FOR SHORT AND LONG EXPLANATIONS
IN SHORT
UPRIGHT: A sense of purpose and underlying meaning to the cumulative events of one’s life. Balanced approach to the seasons of life. Go with the flow. Patience. Transformation over time.
REVERSED: Imbalances, excesses of mood and habit. Analyze one’s relationship to healing, medicine, self-healing, re-alignment. Fixated on the past or the future. Use daily rituals & routines to ground oneself back into the present.
AT LENGTH
The Temperance card shows an artist: self-portrayed as a winged angel. The artist presents as both feminine and masculine—understanding that one can find an experience of feast within the process of a fast and still be hungry within an endless feast. This is a body held together by a medical casts procedures and bandages. Yet, she is made fiercely strong through the meanings she attributes to every aspect of her life and ailments. The body cast over her torso is adorned in a hand-painted homage to a the loss of a possible life. This loss opens up to the birth of something else—a dream which fills her heart’s center. This is a revolutionary’s dream, emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, the Mexican sun, and revolutionary star, and her devotion to a future communism, transforms every piece of illnesses into resilience.
She wears a crown of ribbons, and her focused eyes seem to guide a falling chalice that unleashes a surreal spill of waters, which almost magically seem to move to the cup that sits upright in her lap. Despite the angelic wings, she wants you to know that nothing here is magic. It is composed and intentional presentation, because this is the path to transformation. She is surrounded by stalks of seasonal irises, unveiling the depth and wonder of all that they had hidden before it was time to blossom. The Temperance card brings guidances towards inner peace and prosperity. The way towards a more vibrant future is to be found in loving rituals of devotion to watering the garden of the present day and nourishing the memories of the past buried deep in the soil.
IN DEPTH:
Frida Kahlo, (born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, 6.07.1907– 13.07.1954) was a Mexican painter known for her self-portraits and votive-like montages, inspired by her biographical experiences, marxism, the visual culture of Mexico. She held a life-long engagement with Marxist thinking, and socially situated herself in dialogues with other famed figures of Painting, Communism and Feminisms (examples can be seen in her relationships with Georgia O’Keefe, Leon Trotsky, and husband Diego Rivera). Although she and her work travelled to far-off locations like New York & Paris, she spent much of her life within walls of her childhood home, la Casa Azul. In her last days, Kahlo was mostly bedridden with pneumonia, although she made her last public appearances on 2 July 1954, participating with Rivera in a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala. She seemed to anticipate her death, as she spoke about it with visitors and filled her diaries with drawings skeletons and angels. Attending the demonstrations worsened her condition, and on the night of 12 July 1954, Kahlo had a high fever and was in extreme pain, and it is speculated that she chose to medicate towards her own death.
In many ways her art work and engagement in revolutionary thought is overshadowed by the public fascination with her life— so marked by uncanny accidents, strife, queer and unpredictable persona, and the resilient persistence of passion for life. Despite this sometimes problematic caricature of rebel kitsch, if one takes the time to look deeper into her paintings and self-presentation we see a life committed to a collective communist revolution, and a personal liberation from the confines of what readily meets the eye.
FURTHER READINGS: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/22/frida’s-corsets/
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-frida-kahlos-love-affair-communist- revolutionary-impacted-art
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