Amor, calor and dolor — love, heat and pain — words from painter Frida Kahlo’s diary are emblazoned on a fiery quilt dedicated to the Mexican artist.
The themes of Kahlo’s life have preoccupied artist Jan Prichard-Cohen, who shows her third hand-stitched quilt dedicated to Kahlo for the Summer Studio Tour this weekend.
“She loved color, animals, life – and she loved her country,” Prichard-Cohen said. “I learn from each quilt I make the power each one of us has to make something fine out of the bits and pieces of adversity.”
A near-fatal accident in 1925 that left Kahlo in chronic pain also impelled her to begin to paint. In more than 200 works, Kahlo gave tangible expression to both her physical torment and her vitality.
The images she painted of herself – nearly always frontal, composed and self-contained – might be fractured, pierced by arrows, knives and nails , or wear a necklace of thorns.
In 1928 she met Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and married him a year later.
Kahlo and Rivera both were both resolutely Communist and traveled in sophisticated international art circles until her death in 1954 at age 47. But Kahlo’s work suffered from relative neglect until the combination of the women’s movement, resurgence in interest in figurative painting in the 1980s and increasing emphasis on art outside the Western tradition brought her work to the fore.
The Mexican artist’s unflinching gaze from under her trademark unibrow, stitched onto a quilt square is duplicated in the postcards, posters and magazine pages that line Prichard-Cohen’s studio walls.
“What I do is immerse myself in books and paintings,” she said. “I listen to her folk music. I’m meditating on the subject matter.”
Prichard-Cohen earned an MFA from Michigan State University and taught in a community colleges there before moving to the island in 1986 and working at Esther’s Fabrics on Winslow Way.
She makes her quilts from material already printed with images of Kahlo’s paintings, which have become popularized since the recent biographical film “Frida.”
She hand-dyes the swatches, and the resulting quilt features more shades of gold and red than gradations of gray in a Northwest sky.
The vivid color is a counterpoint to her more somber stoneware pottery and evokes her many trips to Mexico.
Prichard-Cohen grew up in San Diego, Calif. near the Mexican border, and came to admire her southern neighbors.
“It’s an ancient culture,” she said. “It’s withstood the French and the Spanish and they manage to live next to us and it doesn’t faze them.”
As the quilt takes shape, the work conjures family history as well, as Prichard-Cohen sees her hands transformed into the hands of the great-aunts who made quilts while she watched.
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The third annual Summer Studio Tour, sponsored by the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council, runs from 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. Aug. 8-9, and 11a.m. – 5 p.m. Aug. 10.
The tour features works by 37 artists displayed in four home studios. The juried show offers fine wood furniture, jewelry, textiles, pottery, glass, paintings, garden art, fabric, and photography.
Live music and artists’ demos enliven the venues.
Maps for the free, self-guided tour are at the Bainbridge Island Chamber of Commerce and Bainbridge Arts and Crafts, or at www.bistudiotour.com.
For more information, call
(360) 779-2097 or email kathryn@keveoriginals.com.
As the Kahlo quilts develop, she customizes the pre-printed images, stitching around some forms and building shapes into the fabric to frame others.
Plants and fruit appear, echoing the images Kahlo painted toward the end of her life, when the artist could only paint the fruit bought at market and placed on the table next to her bed,
She outlines words from Kahlo’s diaries, journals often composed of strings of oblique but evocative phrases often penned by Kahlo when medicated for the pain that dogged her:
Elm tree. Olmedo. Violet. canary buzzing – stoning – whiteness of gray road…
The quilt’s patterns of words and images are intricate and Prichard-Cohen’s unconventional approach to quilting is calculated to let the squares emerge spontaneously.
“I built around the images to try to capture the spirit of Frida, her love of life and color,” she said.
There are cactus, thorns and barbed wire, but there are also these words from Kahlo’s diary: “We live in a dream” and “Nothing is worth more than laughter.”
“Some people turn sour, bitter and cynical,” Prichard-Cohen said. “Then you have someone like this teaching you something else.
“This is the key to her: she lived her pain. She painted her pain and it’s in her painting, and what they celebrate is love of life.”
