Eun Kim’s Reviews > Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo > Status Update

"Easy for you to say, chueca. Easy for you . . . With your pale pornography of hope, your 'dirt road alone,' your pretty ink-stained hands, your little poems in prose, your mouth, your thigh. A rage of perfect white."

"And you sit laughing with all that pain cannot take."

"A piece that was surely hers, a gift for Alejandro Gomez Arias, was a world globe that Frida covered with butterflies and flowers. In a later year when she was sick and unhappy, she asked for it back and covered the butterflies and flowers with red paint. . . ."

"mouthing / love / holding / light / goodbyes."

"Mariana Morilla Safa remembers: In her last days she was lying down, unable to move. She was all eyes."

"Once when a gardener brought her an old chair, asking if he should throw it away, she requested him to give her the broken leg, and she carved her own lips on it to make a gift for a man she loved."

"Since then my themes have always been my sensations, my states of mind, and the deep reactions that life has been causing inside me. I've frequently materialized all that into portraits of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do to express how I felt about myself and what was in front of me."

"I started painting twelve years ago while I was recovering from a bus accident that kept me in bed for nearly a year. In all these years, I've worked with the spontaneous impulse of my feeling. I've never followed any school or anybody's influence; I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I got from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn't say otherwise."

"...all that lives in the minutes of the no-clocks and the no-calendars and the no-empty glances, is him--"

"Her dress is the same one that she did not want to take off on the day of the wedding with no one, when we found her almost asleep on the dirty floor of a street. My skirts with ruffles of lace, and the old blouse . . . make the absent portrait of only one person. But the color of your skin, of your eyes and your hair changes with the wind of Mexico."