Painfully Transplanted

Painting springs from ego, straight to the heart. In the painting world since the20th century,artists began to attach greater importance to ego introspection, and transfer into their works theinner emotion as the theme of artistic expression. Frida Kahlo, a representative of emotionalism,had painted about her family lineage, diseases, frustrations, emotional experiences and grotesquefantasies, showing a strong sense of self-awareness in her works. Frida’s works are free fromrestraints, and her uninhibited painting style has developed into a genre of her own for norestrictions to any others. Through her paintbrush, she presented a multi-dimensional space anddepicted her inner and outside world from different angles. Disease and traffic accident broughther both physical and mental trauma. When painting her dehiscent body or anatomical humanorgans, Frida would of course endow a tense, depressive and painful atmosphere in her works.She was driven to a maniac state in face of the lover’s betrayal and emotional distress. Shepainted about suicide, hurts and a ground of cut hair, conveying a violent and bloody image. Butsuch violence invariably shows a woman’s feelings of pain and helplessness.The current paper will make a deep discussion on three points: first, the reasons for theformation of Frida Kahlo’s magic realism style; second, why could Frida take so important aposition in the art history, and; third, for later generations, what directions should our artisticcreation go along. This paper is divided into four sections to make elaboration based on theabove points. The first section is to present and analyze the social context of Frida’s time, mainlyincluding the Mexican revolution, the prevalence of magic realism literature, the combination ofmultiple nationalities and the Mexican mural movement in the20th century. The second andthird sections relate to the composition of Frida’s paintings. In these two main sections this paperwill make a deep study on the specific presentation of her magic realism, including inneremotions and ego introspection that are implicated in the ethnic culture, symbols and violentscenes. The fourth section further refines this study. By looking into the composition of Frida’spaintings and her unique aesthetic psychology, we elucidate the essential connotation for hersuccess in making paintings, thereby inspiring the artistic creation of our own.Different from previous research topics of master’s thesis, this paper focuses on the violentscenes relating to the magic realism in Frida’s paintings and takes this as an innovation forresearching. Through analyzing violent-paintings in different periods and inner feelingsrepresented in both direct and indirect violence, we conclude that Frida’s paintings are a kind oftransference of painfulness. The whole thesis takes Frida’s ego introspection as the core to showthe essential connotation for her success in painting creation, thus to describe and demonstrate anindividual artist.