Frida Kahlo - A Few Small Nips 1935

Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair 1940

“Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair” was the first self-portrait iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo created after her divorce from artist Diego Rivera. Renouncing the feminine image depicted in her other self-portraits, Kahlo (1907 – 1954) has just cut off the long hair Rivera admired, and is wearing a suit that was most likely his. Conveying the deep sorrow of her loss, the image appears to express Kahlo’s yearning for the freedom and independence of a man. The large empty space around Kahlo suggests the depth of her loneliness and misery, and the song verse above her reads, “See, if I loved you, it was for your hair, Now you’re bald, I don’t love you anymore.”

Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait (1940)

Frida Kahlo: The Two Fridas (1939)

Frida Kahlo: The Little Deer (1946)

Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego in My Thoughts) 1943

Frida Kahlo: What the Water Gave Me (1938)

An unusually revealing self portrait by Kahlo because it also reveals some of her health issues reflected in the water with the open wound next to the big toe, suggesting spina bifida. The painting also shows the shortened toes on the right foot due to surgical procedures. Deformity of the right leg due to polio also caused continual circulation problems, and her life seems to have been one of constant pain. By all accounts some of this was also self-inflicted due to her own choices and poor self management. Alcohol and morphine were her methods of self-medication. She was to eventually die from a morphine overdose which was probably suicide.

Self Portraits

Californian artist Julie Heffernan produces self portraits that portray the artist merged with nature and society in surreal, psychological ways. A mix between de Chirico, Bosch and Archimboldo, Heffernan's unusual approach to the subject matter is achieved through a sort of stream of consciousness approach which she calls "image streaming": 
“Before I’m actually sleeping, as I relax and get out of the conscious mind, pictures will flood into my head, kind of like a movie,” she said. “It’s not like daydreaming or remembering. They’re spontaneous pictures that I just sit back and watch. And then I’ll fall asleep. When I wake up, it’s at that point where the images start to stream in, and out of those, I’ll usually ‘see’ something.” 
The result is these large 2 metre paintings of sensuous, surreal and allegorical images.

Burn brightly, Pete

My Fabulous Nines

Two weeks ago I finished a unit of tonal charcoal drawings with my year 9s (thirteen year olds) and have been working through marking over 50 works today. Self portraits, they worked from photographs taken on the Mac's camera and produced these large (A2 = A4x4) charcoal works. Here's a sample - no names no pack drill - but they all look like them and I'm very pleased with the results:

Burn brightly, Pete