Frida's Dress

Frida's Dress

- Molly Crabapple

 

It is nearly impossible to draw Frida Kahlo. You’re probably laughing at me now. Of course, you can draw Frida Kahlo, you say. Lots of artists have drawn Frida Kahlo. She’s everywhere. Frida has been photographed, sketched, painted, sculpted, silkscreened, traced, and remixed. Stores hawk Frida T-shirts. YouTube brims with Frida makeup tutorials. Tumblr whiz bang pops with blinking Frida GIFs. Street artists stencil Frida’s features onto walls in Kerala and Istanbul, Paris and New York. Her trademark style is simple enough to meet James St James’s rule for nightlife stardom: one can never be truly famous until they are recognisable in stick figure form. Fuck stick figures; to recognise Frida, a viewer needs only to see her monobrow, the single line that she drew blacker and bolder in each of her 55 self-portraits. Frida painted her own face so often, it became a subject as exclusive to her as the traditional Mexican fashion she remixed into armour. Until her death at the age of 47, Frida braced her back with medical corsets, twisted roses in her braids, and painted herself into the status of an icon.

Despite her beauty, her uniqueness, and her ubiquity, I could barely draw Frida Kahlo for this article. All my attempts looked, at best, like Photoshop filters upon the work of The Master. Her numina is too strong. She’s no one’s muse, and no one’s model. Try and paint Frida Kahlo, and one just ends up adding to her body of work.