Exterior and interior landscapes
(Art Therapy with Frida Kahlo’s Paintings)

“I paint flowers, so they will never die.” ( Frida Kahlo)

We can pass by nature indifferently, not admire anything: no living creature or landscape. However, isn’t this a big waste of opportunities that we were given when we came into this world?

The richness of shapes, colors, and forms belonging to the animal world, the world of plants, and to the world of landscape gives us endless possibilities of shaping our internal landscapes.

We can pass by paintings indifferently, we can pretend not to hear the sounds of music, and we can close ourselves off to art. However, isn’t it a big waste of the opportunities that art and its creators give us to shape our inner landscapes?

I have believed in the power of art and its influence on us in everyday life for a long time. It’s not about listening to a concert or going to an exhibition once in a while. The point is that art should fill our everyday life. Art shoul be our companion. Art does not have to be for holidays. Let the art be for ordinary days.

At the exhibition entitled “Frida Kahlo. The Life of an Icon. An Immersive Biography” I had an artistic experience that I call a near-death experience.

I already know what I would like my paradise to look like. I imagined my paradies more than once.

I found myself in the body of the artist Frida Kahlo and dreamed her artistic dreams. I saw everything she painted, I saw the shapes and colors that delighted her and what hurt her.

Frida and me :)

It happened in the Seventh Room with a 10-minute VR screening. Please believe me, because I can’t easily put this experience into words, and you can’t take pictures during a movie. It was only recorded in the matrix of my brain.

Sitting on Friday Kahlo’s bed, we watch the landscapes from her paintings, the landscapes of her city, the landscapes from her dreams.

At first, this dream still resembles reality. We are in her room. We see furniture, a bed, a dressing table, and a window with a view of the world. Suddenly, we fly out of the open window on her bed and glide like a car through the city streets. You can hear Mexican music, the weather is beautiful, and the world of Frida Kahlo’s paintings begins to surround us.

We float slightly above the ground. This does not make me anxious yet. However, the apparent reality is behind us.

We rise to the sky, and landscapes appear as if from the windows of an airplane, we reach the clouds, but we are surrounded all the time by the colors, shapes, and objects that Frida Kahlo painted in her paintings. We immerse ourselves in the air, which is filled with watermelons, flowers, birds, monkeys, and skulls taken out of her paintings.

“Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything dissolves, everything flies and disappears.” ( Frida Kahlo)

I filled myself with colors. I felt free as never before. I was calm. I was surprised by the feeling of happiness. Everything delighted me.

Have I been in a paradise?

I didn’t want to return from this place, although at the moment of sudden flight up I felt ordinary human fear and even fear of heights. Later I felt only peace and delight.

This journey could go on forever.

It was difficult for me to free myself from these images.

It was a paradise. I was in paradise.

I have always had very serious ideas about paradise. Based rather on the description from the Apocalypse of St. John, which has always made a great impression on me. The throne of God in heaven, torches, a choir of angels, old men in white robes, trumpet sounds, torches, jasper and carnelian stones, emerald and singing: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord, God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come.

It still moves me.

Now I know that my paradise, which I would like to be, looks a little different. I hope that chambers like this Seventh Room in the Norblin Factory in Warsaw also have the right to exist in God’s paradise.

Frida Kahlo and her life

I need similar images every day. I want to fill myself with such images. My eyes long to see the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, so that my inner landscape is close to this paradise.

Now, here, in everyday life.

Not someday, later, by the way.

I hope that this real paradise will only be more beautiful. Although it doesn’t have to.

In the one I was in, created by the visions of only one artist, it was delightful.

I now imagine paradise as many chambers from which you can go from one to another, filled with paintings, visions of Van Gogh, Monet, maybe Wyspiański or Mehoffer, and filled with landscapes from our world created by nature, filled with music of my favourite composers.

Frida Kahlo- The artist’s beautiful face

I cannot co-create this world. I don’t have such talent. But I know that I will always persuade myself and others to make art present in their lives, to add its unique taste, color, and shape to life.

„Not even a storm, nor silence, nor a drought will disturb me on my way,

nor a new and new horizon, nor a new and new mirage,

but the image of the world viewed from above the top of the soul.

Today I climbed up there, I have found my paradise, paradise without frontiers.”

(Przemysław Gintrowski, Song titled The Return)

https://youtu.be/xvnmUCLa9Lc?feature=shared

Dante Alighieri said that three things are left to us from the lost paradise: the stars, the flowers, and the eyes of a child.

Artists look at reality through the eyes of a child. Let us look at reality in this way as well.

Stars and flowers. Let’s look at them too. More often.

Yours M.