Frida Kahlo & Art As A Refuge

Frida Kahlo has always been carried in my heart as an inspiration.  There has been so much written about her over the past 25 years that I post this with some hesitation and yet I feel so refreshed just by spending this time now looking through her work and considering the way she took refuge in painting and drawing. 

Art has been a place to go for me as well.  It is a place where I can find some measure of healing, some amount of peace.  In spite of what may be going on all around me there is this gentle knitting back together inside when I finally settle down to work on an creating an image.

Aron Wiesenfeld Shares His Thoughts

Greenhouse

Dog

Wedding

Winter Cabin

These are the paintings of Aron Wiesenfield.  I can not even remember where I first stumbled on to Aron's work but we were both included in a group show at North Park University in Chicago curated by Tim Lowly. Then I read his interview in High Fructose magazine which left me wanting to know more about this very poetic figurative painter. 

The enigmatic images that he creates seem to occupy a territory some where in-between our dreams and waking life. This is an artist I keep returning because I feel and empathy for the characters in these paintings that seem to have a almost reckless need to reconnect with the natural world even at their own unprepared parole.

As an adolescent I would go into the woods with a sketch book and look for the link back to my wild natural past locked up somewhere under all the layers of polyester, television shows and meaningless school work. So when I spend time with Aron Wiesenfeld paintings that old desire to re-enter the woods begins to knock on my door.

Aron was generous enough to give thoughtful responses to a short list of questions I recently sent to him.  Please take the time to let these strangely beautiful paintings haunt your life.

1, Do you have any daily work rituals that you can describe?

 I try to start around 11am and work for about 8 hours.  The way I spend the day really varies.  If I'm beginning something, I spend most of my time looking and considering.  If I'm at the end of a piece, it's all work.

2, Do your images come to your mind fully developed or are they revealed as you draw and paint?

Images develop in different ways, but generally I begin a piece with a notion of some kind: a sketch,  some writing, or maybe a memory that seems to have potential.   It gets altered as I try things and look at things.  It's about 50% inspiration, and 50% discovering.

3, Can you say what you would like your paintings to do for the people who come in contact with them?

I paint things that have meaning for me, that's all I can do.  After that I hope that some people will feel what I feel.

4, Are there particular sources that you keep returning to for inspiration whether authors, film makers, musicians....

So many.  Here's a few:

Anselm Kiefer

Alex Katz

Caspar david Freidrich

Titian

August Sander

Haruki Murakami

Peter Stamm

Charles Simic

The Smiths

5, Do believe in a spiritual dimension or are  you more of a materialist?

I think everything not in my direct line of vision is the realm of the spirit.  Other words I would use are the unknown, the unconscious, magic, and death.  

6, Do you have a story you can share regarding how one of your paintings effected someone?

I did a painting called "Dog" several years ago.  A man with cancer saw it when it was being framed.  I never spoke to him, but I was told it had a strong meaning for him about what he was going through, so he bought it.  

7, Was there a particular time or experience that brought you to the place of launching into art for a profession?

I had the idea that I would be an artist when I was 12, but I could never have guessed what a twisting path it would actually be.

Frida Kahlo Is My Artisic Mother

If Balthus is my artistic father than I must claim  Frida Kahlo as my mother. Frida was left out of all the art history lectures I attended in college in the 70s. I was not until the extensive biography by Hayden Herrera published in 1983 that took her out of the shadow of her famous plump gun toting husband Diago Rivera. It was then that picture books about her began to show up on the library book shelves around the country.  Eventualy we had the movie they made with Selma Hayec in 2002. Frida became a pop icon giving women everywhere another costume option for halloween

I find it moving that Frida not only continued to live out a full artistic life in spite of her physical handicaps (She was in a terrible accident on a city bus as a young woman that left her with a broken spine. Her whole life the complications from this accident became an increasingly worse and more painful situation for her.) but her suffering and limitations actually became creative fodder for her artistic journey as a painter.  Reflecting on Frida's courage to continue has brought me comfort through out my own life when I have had to struggle with my own perennial limitations and hardships.

I love that her work is so powerful on an intimate scale.  In a world of big macho painters like Julian Schnable and Robert Rauschenberg who have became famous in part by the impressive scale of their work it is alwas refreshing to take another look at the life changing paintings of Frida Kahlo, most of which are small enough that they could be tucked into a suitcase if need be. There is also a strong narrative element to her works that borrows heavily from the folk art that she surrounded herself with. Coming out of the minimalist art of the 1970s --painting was definitely not figurative - let alone should it attempt to tell a story.  Along comes the rediscovery of Frida Kahlo and the minimalist rhetoric gets kicked down the stairs to make room for a whole new generation of painters who were to reestablish the narrative figure painting path for artists such as myself.

Balthus Gives Us A Magical Way To Pass Through The Looking Glass

Balthus may be one of my all time favorite painters of our time. This slide show takes you through several of his life works. He lived from 1908-2001. Bono sang at his funeral.

What I love about his work is the way he carried a strong connection with the past and yet remained completely contemporary. The way he paints the figure has such a strong sense of volume that it feels like sculpture. The surface textures and rich color together with his classical sense of composition helps to make each painting hauntingly poetic.

The mirror has many possible symbolic meanings but I think the one most appropriate to Balthus is the mirror as a metaphor for the spiritual world.  In the mirror we see another world reflected much like ours yet different, a world that we can see but are not able to pass into unless by some magic or spiritual opening as was the case with Alice the morning she passed into her looking glass.  With Balthus, painting itself functions as a sort of  magical way to pass through into a world of greater spiritual potency and more vivid beauty.

"A painting without a frame is like a soul with out a body." van Gogh

Frames have always been a big deal to me.  I think of them as giving a place for the painting to live in.  They are a home for the painting.  I will use anything I can get my hands on to build the right frame.  I have repurposed mirror frames. I have cut an joined old house interior trim.  I have even carved moulding from blank stock using hand planes and carving tools. Sometimes I will gold leaf my frames using the ancient art of water gilding.  I may be  the only one in my city who is working with this method. Making my own frames is a big investment of my time. I have struggled with it over the years thinking if I could just buy ready made frames or hand it over to the frame shop I would have more time for painting and I would become a better painter. I seldom have the money to  pay for some one to make a frame for me so I have clung to this commitment over the years and it has become a very important component of what makes my work unique my own.  The simple truth is that when a painting has the right frame it becomes even more  The frame pictured here on  the painting titled String Game is constructed from very old walnut interior house trim with a ebonized insert to mimic the kind of frames used in 15th Century Northern Europe. It has been polished with a bees wax furniture polish.