Las Dos Frida
“The great question that has never been answered, and which
I have not yet been able to answer ,despite my thirty years of research into
the feminine soul, is “what does a woman want?”” This is the great Sigmund
Freud for you, a baffled psychoanalyst who in-between smoking innumerable
cigars could not figure out the fairer sex. A man’s perspective I concur which
I beg to defer, it’s not what a woman wants but what she gets as she goes
through life that determines the evolution of her soul.
Many words are thrown at your face when it comes to
describing women, beauty, grace, strength, persistence, patience….. but when I
look for a visual confirmation that encapsulates the reality of what it means
to be a woman, I look at the paintings of Frida Kahlo!
Las dos Fridas or the two Fridas is the painting I am
presently staring at on my computer screen, there they sit the two Fridas with
matching unibrows, forlorn expressions in their eyes and a faint shadow of a
moustache above thin pressed lips, but when I look away from the face I see the
poignant difference between the duality of the same woman. One is Diego’s Frida
in her Indian garb with a choate heart while the other is the Frida, Diego
discarded through divorce, a torn wedding dress and a dissected heart,
representative of two different stages in the artists life interlinked with an
artery in-between. Naïve art is what they call her style but she chose be her
own muse and captured the reality of her own life on canvas. This is a painting
not about love lost and dejection but about taking control, where one stops the
bleeding and holds on to their better self, never letting go. As two Fridas
hold hands and stare back at me, it makes me wonder about all the women I know
living their lives parallel to mine. Some of them battle career woes, others
broken hearts, some struggle to come in terms with motherhood while others
yearn for a child as the clock ticks by.
The alternating duality of their souls has been bruised by tough times
but they hold on to the wholesome version of themselves ,taking control and never
letting go the essence of who they are meant to be. So I revert back to
re-iterate that it’s not what a woman wants but what is thrown at her in life
that she moulds herself around…malleability being the key word here but which
can be done with flair and flamboyance....the Frida way….A fiery comet is what Frida Kahlo was,
a woman before her time, crippled in body but not in spirit, the very portrait
of the feminine soul.
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