A PORTRAIT OF ONE'S OWN

On Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s birth anniversary, women artists talk about the cathartic process of painting and photographing themselves

- ANUSREE PV

THERE is a metaphoric bond between portraits and the perplexities we humans experience. An ambivalent mind, an aching heart, a body and its spurts of joy, a slump of illness, a strong sweeping death. And between all these junctures, our lives are marred with minuscule moments. Years ago, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo mastered the art of preserving these fragments of moments she survived. She poured the raw colours of miscarriage, birth, spinal operation, and her own inner conflicts onto her canvas. Her artistic style of never distancing herself from her canvas, depicting pain with resilience, has struck a chord with many. Decades later, women still create their own style of portraits, where they don’t feel the need to put a veil on the vulnerability of the body or the mind. If Frida Kahlo were alive today, she would probably feel the grip of solidarity — the collective idea of creating a self-paved visual identity —very strongly.

Women artists share their intimate relationship with colours, canvas, cameras, and themselves and how they have been witnessing their lives through self-portrait paintings and photographs.

INITIALLY, the intention of photography for Irene*, a self-taught artist, was just to get good portraits. She says, “It later became a tool to know myself; it became a ritual to sit in front of the camera at least once a month and pose.” After she has played with palettes on her eyelids and lips, she sits in front of the camera. She wanders around her room with her camera clutched tight whenever she feels low. She then captures the little joys of reading a poem or singing a song. “That becomes a way of letting go of disturbing thoughts.” These photographs of her personal moments are often not saved or uploaded anywhere. She says, “It’s just an act of archiving myself in the moment. Maybe trying to let my brain know that I am trying.”