Little Fridas Everywhere
Lessons from a great artist for those of us who aren't. Plus, does Posh also have Kate in Chloé on her pinboard?
I’m not an artist. (“Yeah, no shit,” says everyone who has ever attended a craft night with me.) But I love artists.
One hilarious fact I’d forgotten when I was writing about my first trip to Mexico City 25 years ago was that we’d gone to an art gallery—my guess is it was the Palacio de Bellas Artes—where there was a giant banner of a Diego Rivera mural hung outside. I, an 18-year-old who had seen a Diego Rivera mural in Detroit not too many years prior, decided I didn’t need to go inside the gallery and see that one then.
I’ve regretted it ever since.
Though not enough to go see his work during my most recent trip to Mexico City, apparently. I’m now much more interested in Frida Kahlo (who was married to Diego Rivera for those of you who aren’t up on Art History’s power couples) and who, as you may have seen, just broke the auction record for an artwork by a woman.
Frida’s likeness is found all over Mexico City in dolls and bags and mugs and murals. She feels very much alive, even though she died almost 70 years ago. Partly—and bear with me because this seems like a trivial point but illustrates a much bigger one—because of her style.
At a time when the dominant trend was European clothing, Frida dressed in traditional Mexican clothes from different regions of the country. Seeing her mother’s lacy European dress at the Museo Casa Kahlo hammered that contrast home: it looked old fashioned. Frida, on the other hand, with her chunky stone necklaces and wide-hemmed skirts, doesn’t look of a particular time. Her style is immortal.
Frida’s father was a photographer back when that was a wild new technology and she would touch up his photographs, which is part of how she learned to be so detailed in her own paintings. Though Paris Hilton staked claim to inventing the selfie, Frida, using her father’s photography equipment, had her beat by more than half a century.
Her life was wild—there’s a lot to learn about her. But I’m interested in what we can learn from her.
I used to buy into the idea that some people are creative and others aren’t. I no longer believe that. Maybe because I’ve listened to a lot of Brené Brown. In my Origin Story post I talked about the germination phase—the waiting, if you will—that I was in when my older kids were really little. I distinctly remember listening to Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic podcast while sitting in the basement playroom of our old house, braindead from lack of sleep, watching my kids play and just trying to stay awake while propped against a bright yellow Ikea couch.
In the Big Magic episode with Brené Brown—which is nearly ten years old!—Brené says, “I absolutely understand personally (and professionally from the data) that there are no such thing as non-creative people. There are just people who use their creativity and people who don’t. And unused creativity is not benign…it metastasizes into resentment, grief, heartbreak. People sit on that creativity or they deny it and it festers.”
In other words, we all have it, we just lose it because we don’t use it and that bums us out. I already see it happening in my kids now that 2/3 of them are at an age when they’re hypercritical of their creations. Their self-criticism kills me, but I try to remind myself I didn’t take photography in high school because I thought it would make me weird.
There’s good news though: we can get it back. Even if what we create is less than stellar. It’s about the process, not the product. (Somebody please put that on a bumpersticker!)
The Casa Club in La Condesa in Mexico City gets it: you can stop in, grab a pastry, rent art supplies and work on whatever it is that inspires you. The little café/studio is one more mini Mexico City must-see I’d like to add to my list for VITA Magazine because I wholeheartedly believe real-word making is more important than ever in this, our AI-bubble-how-much-is-too-much-screentime-has-my-phone-permanently-shattered-my-attention-span era.
Craft nights with your friends count. Pottery workshops at your local community centre count. Stealing your kid’s art supplies counts.
Anyway, make bad art; that’s my thesis. It’s not like you were going to shatter any auction records anyway.
Thank you again, Flair Airlines and Tourism Mexico City, for making my trip possible!
Worth the Wait
My dream apartment is a set. This piece in Wallpaper says much of the furniture in the Julia Roberts film After the Hunt (on Prime) was inspired by Viennese designer Josef Hoffman, whose pieces you can find on Chairish.
Victoria Beckham is very, very important to me intellectually, emotionally and spiritually (I was Posh Spice in every Spice Girls thing we did in high school and it was the 90s so we did quite a few). Amy Odell from Back Row, one of my favourite Substacks, just did a deep dive into Victoria Beckham’s documentary outfits and I am left with one burning question: Does Posh’s grey t-shirt and wide-leg jeans look not remind you of Kate Moss’s Chloé jeans situation from 2008?
If you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’d rather just buy art,” and you’re in Vancouver this weekend, the Emily Carr Student Art Sale will set you up with works of emerging artists while Got Craft will check a bunch of things off your giving list. And your own wish list.
If you’re in America, Happy Thanksgiving! And no matter where you are—I’m thankful you’re here (GET IT?!) <3