Museum Pages: Frida Kahlo and the Artist’s Body

on making art while in pain

This is not very modern-enlightenment self-care girly of me, I know, but I often hate my body. Not because of the way it looks—it looks fine—but because of the way it feels. My primary, near-constant physical sensation is pain. My body is the source of this pain, and so my relationship to it is mostly hostile. I take care of it because I have to—feed it well and stretch and massage and exercise it and schlep it to doctors’ offices and saunas, like throwing pieces of meat to a guard dog or speaking politely to a police officer: diversions, offerings, pleas to be spared.

I have not written much about my chronic pain. Mostly because I resent how much of my time and energy it already takes up—the time spent managing it, and also just the energy it takes to be in pain. Chronic pain means multi-tasking all the time. No matter what I’m doing, I’m also engaged in the act of being in pain. Writing and being in pain. Cooking and being in pain. Spending time with my husband or my friends and being in pain. Traveling and visiting places I’ve dreamed of for years and being in pain.

I was in pain while I walked through Frida Kahlo’s blue house in Mexico City, a place I’ve wanted to see for years; the main reason I wanted to go to Mexico City. The sun was shining on the rich blue walls, and the line of eager people snaked slowly through the artist’s kitchen, and I was in pain.

It was a relatively good pain day, which means my back only hurt at a low, persistent hum—not an overwhelming air raid siren. But the previous day had been a bad pain day, the kind where every single thought was interrupted by an awareness of pain. The high altitude triggered a migraine, which joined forces with my usual back pain to make me only half present as my husband and I explored the Museo Nacional de Antropología and then took a long walk to a fancy dinner.

The next day, the last day of our trip, as we headed to the Casa Azul, my migraine had receded and my back pain quieted somewhat. But the day after a bad pain day I tend to feel lightly flayed, more sensitive to light and sound and emotion, like the seconds after a near-miss car accident, but extended for hours. My nerves recovering from the shock, catching their breath.

Perhaps this is why the item in Frida’s house that struck me most was the bed she had set up in a small room just off of her painting studio. I could so clearly see her sitting at her easel for just a little longer than her body wanted her to, finally relenting and going to lie down when her chronic pain (lasting impacts of a bus accident) became too much. I could feel so palpably the frustration of being interrupted in this way, of hitting your physical limit long before your inspiration has run its course.

I am writing this, back home, sitting in the squashy blue recliner I bought in an attempt to lengthen the amount of time per day that I am physically able to work. I have a high quality ergonomic desk chair, but even so I can only sit at my desk for a few hours before the muscles of my back seize up and become so painful that I can’t focus on anything else. I can usually sit in the recliner for a few more hours after that.

Frida’s bed has a mirror affixed above it, so that she could look at herself while lying down; could continue to paint her self-portraits even when her body forced her out of her studio.

Frida’s self-portraits are what I intended to write about here. What I have long wanted to write about. One of the many essay ideas I had for First Love that never came to fruition was about selfies, and Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, and self-depiction as self-creation, and people who dismiss all forms of self-depiction, from selfies to self-portraits to memoir writing, as frivolous (read: feminine).

I took a selfie in the mirror in Frida’s studio, set up next to her paints. I felt literal goosebumps on my arms as I imagined her face reflected in this same mirror; her self-depiction and self-creation happening in the very room in which I stood, with its rich red-tiled floors and wide windows overlooking her vast garden, luxurious afternoon light streaming in. I had a vague inkling that this was a moment I would write about—that maybe I’d write a shorter version of my “selfies and memoir and Frida Kahlo” essay for this newsletter.

But then I walked into the next room and saw her bed, set up conveniently for her to fall into when she physically couldn’t paint anymore, and I felt my stomach drop. Felt a lurch of recognition that I knew was going to tug me into writing something.

Another reason I have not written much about my chronic pain is that I don’t find it interesting. I see no metaphors or complexities or questions in it. There is no deeper meaning. There is only this sensation in my back that I wish was not there. Even the death of my father, a massive grief that has shaped two-thirds of my life, I was able to find generative on the page. But back pain is just back pain. It doesn’t add anything to my art, it gets in the way of it by competing for my attention, forcing me away from my desk, draining my energy.

Likewise, I never thought I would write about Frida Kahlo through the lens of her disability, because I didn’t think I had anything to say about it. I’m not interested in finding “inspiration” in the fact that she lived with sometimes-debilitating pain, and still managed to paint so many masterpieces. I don’t want to write anything that might even gesture toward her pain being a good thing because it shaped so much of who she was as an artist.

And so I won’t.

When I walked through Frida’s studio and arrived at the bed, I didn’t find it inspiring. I didn’t think about how she managed to “overcome” her pain to thrive as an artist. I felt the thrum of my own frustration, and I imagined hers. I thought of my recliner and the bargaining I do with my body, hoping it will let me work just a little longer. And I thought maybe I would try to write something about the recognition I felt in that moment, without trying to make Frida’s pain, or my own, into anything more than itself.

Museum Pages is an ongoing series about writing and visual art. Read past installments here.