As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Diego RiveraRead
Never before had a woman put such agonizing poetry on canvas as Frida did
Interpretation
Diego Rivera praises Frida Kahlo's unique ability to express deep emotions through her artwork.
This quote highlights Frida Kahlo's profound impact on the art world, specifically in her ability to convey her personal struggles and emotions through her paintings. Diego Rivera, her husband and a notable artist himself, acknowledges that her work transcends traditional boundaries, offering an intense and agonizing poetic representation of her experiences on canvas that was unmatched by any other woman artist of her time.
In practice
In an art class discussion, this quote can illustrate the depth of emotion in Kahlo's work.
As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.
My cubist paintings are my most Mexican.
The artist must try to raise the level of taste of the masses, not debase himself to the level of unformed and impoverished taste.
An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can't feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn't capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won't put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn't a great artist.
I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life. And would continue to be, up to the moment she died, 27 years later.
When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.
Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.