Sunday, February 13, 2011

Frida Kahlo's "The Dream"

Everyone has their own way of releasing and expressing their own emotions and thoughts. Some people have their hobbies that make them feel relaxed and free of stress and anxiety. But the most fascinating way to express a thought or emotion is by art. It can either be by singing, dancing, drawing or painting. Some forms of art require talent in order for the public to understand and appreciate it. But when it comes to art in form of a drawing or a painting, anyone can express themselves. Whether or not you have talent to draw or paint, your work will always reflect what you felt and what you thought about at that moment when it was created. This is the most interesting way you can express yourself because you are sharing a visual piece of your emotions and thoughts with everyone else. It’s something that maybe you wouldn’t be able to explain with words but you transformed it into art and placed it into a paper or canvas to allow others to try and interpret what you meant to say or show.
 It can be difficult to interpret a painting because you can find endless meanings to a specific piece of work and never know exactly what it really means unless you ask the artist who created it. But to me, trying to understand a painting is the most interesting and fun part because you assume what the meaning is according to your own thoughts and emotions and believe that must be what the artist meant to say. But I don’t think it’s important to guess what the painting really means. To me, it’s more important to hear all the other opinions and views of other people who interpreted the same painting but in a whole completely different way in which also makes sense.

            Frida Kahlo was an exceptional artist who expressed her emotions through her paintings in a very peculiar way. All of Frida’s work portrays her life and her feelings about it which mainly had to do with her accidents, family, Diego, love and her Mexican culture and beliefs. The painting that caught my attention the most was this painting above called, “The Dream” (also sometimes called “The Bed”) which was painted in 1940. This painting to me, symbolizes the life of Frida and how she sees death within her or near her. The branches and leaves on the bed sheet represent life and how it wraps Frida completely from head to toe. At the bottom of the sheets, there are roots that seem to have been pulled out of the ground. This could represent Frida’s life from the beginning when she was born and her life that grows in the branches and leaves on top of her. But maybe since the roots were pulled off the ground, this could mean that Frida feels that her life is being pulled out of the world completely from the roots. This way, there is no way she can survive or continue living and growing. Also since most of her life she spent in bed, that’s where her life, pulled out with roots and everything, must try to live and survive by laying there. I also think that the skeleton on top of her bed symbolizes death being near her or watching over her to take her at any moment.  It could also mean that the skeleton is Frida but on the inside or under the covers of life that wrap around her. The explosives that the skeleton has may symbolize her pain that she is living or maybe time in such way that death can come suddenly as an explosion and she is just waiting for it to blow up. The skeleton also holds flowers that could mean that Frida didn’t see death as something scary or sad, but more of a natural thing that reminded her that no one can live forever. She chose clouds as her background because it could symbolize her painting being a dream or could also mean that she is slowly going up to heaven and is detaching herself from earth and life.

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