The process of existence

At Art Journal Journey this month inspiration is Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter, who’s full name actually sounds like a beautiful Spanish song, but who’s real life turned out to painful, even though she referred to it as “I am not sick just broken”. Well anyway she had a lot of courage to continue to paint after her unfortunate accident. I like the colors on her paintings and the way she tries to catch the reality. So here is my spread inspired by Frida Kahlo:

“pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process of existence” the image is Frida Kahlo. I chose red for main color in my background for two reason: one – trying to express her pain and suffering and two – her devotion towards the socialist system. First I pulled a horizontal line with red acrylic ink in the middle of my page. Then I colorized my page, giving it more red accent with Lindy’s stamp gang sprays (autumn maple crimson and wild honeysuckle coral).

Then I had this idea in my head, in Frida’s diary stands “I don’t paint dreams or nightmares…”, so I wanted to make bubbles that can be popped, bubbles can be dreams or nightmares who knows… you can have them till you like them and if you want to get rid of them just pop them! So I painted some circles with turquoise and chrime green light. “I paint my own reality…” To make them more real I dropped some shadows around them with pan pastel. In some of them I wrote the name of Frida with gel pen.

I had an image of Frida, as image of well known personages, I posterized it in Photoshop and printed it. I used gel medium for my image transfer. 

I liked the grunge, faded look on my page. On the other side I added the quote from Frida’s diary with gel pen.

So that’s my painted reality for Frida Kahlo. I am sharing my spread with Art Journal Journey august challenge.

Advertisement