Ubiquitous Frida

The city of San Miguel has become over-saturated with tourist art by artists who cater to the tourist trade. Many of centro’s galleries are overflowing with impressionistic views of city streets and landmarks, so much so that my walks are often spoiled by the unchecked proliferation of these works. The eyes grow tired of them, and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t look into a shop window or read a restaurant menu without being confronted by them.  I can hardly tell them apart – they all look so tediously the same. Sometimes they strike me as having been produced by the same artists, and often I muse that they have been cranked out by gnomes with over-active hormones working at a conveyer belt in a secret factory-like studio driven on by a demonic overseer wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails.

Without a doubt, the chief icons of the city are the Parroquia (the cathedral made of pink granite in the principal square and looking like a Gaudi gone a little conservative), and Frida Kahlo.

Painted and photographed images of the Parroquia show up everywhere, and although the cathedral is an amazingly complex and beautiful work of architecture deserving our reverence, it is and should remain a cherished symbol that should not be overly reproduced. As Mark Twain said, familiarity breeds contempt.

Frida Kahlo is the undisputed queen of this town. Her image is exploited endlessly and nauseatingly by artists of every stripe. Her portraits appear in the lowliest places among the most vulgar of venues, on handbags, tote bags, shopping bags, and bagatelles. And now -- most deplorably -- on a six pack of beer! Commercialism gone mad!  What next, Frida Fries at McDonald's? ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! THIS FRIDA FRENZY MUST STOP!

It’s high time for the artists of San Miguel to place a moratorium on the production of these images. Do so voluntarily, dear artists, before the forces of good taste rise up and destroy them!

FRIDA
by A. S. Maulucci

She suffered greatly,
there is no doubt,
and out of this suffering
came her art.

Much of it gruesome,
some of it grotesque,
but in the best,
a beauty of a brutal kind.

Perhaps we’ll find no word for it
except to say she endured.
Somehow, making portraits of herself
helped her soul grow wings.

Painting with blood knit her spirit,
nurtured it like a tree,
and gave her a handhold
as she crawled through days of pain.

In her pictures we can hear a voice that sings,
not like an angel but a wounded child,
a voice that often cracks, gasps, croaks
with agony but never wails or whines,
endures each hammer stroke
with head held high.

Her soul is tremulous like a violin,
and each brush stroke plays a note
with dignity and with terrible force
as if suffering were the natural course
for every woman
who still has the keeping of her heart.

Nothing strangled in her jangled pain,
nothing tangled, nothing mangled,
it is simple pain, pure and plain,
splattered with grace upon a canvas
for all who have the courage
to look upon her nakedness
without shame.