Frida Risen From the Dark

She faces forward exactly as she did in paint, unbroken eyebrow and all, a hummingbird dead at her throat and a black cat crouched at her shoulder like a warning no one heeded. Frida Risen From the Dark is a tribute to Frida Kahlo's Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, and it is an independent, unique work by Tijs Dragtsma, not a copy, a reproduction, a print or an edition of Kahlo's painting, and not made, authorised, endorsed or licensed by the artist, her estate or any foundation carrying her name.

Kahlo wore that necklace as both wound and ornament, a private mythology turned outward, the cat standing in for ill fortune and the hummingbird, in Mexican folklore, for luck and for love even caught lifeless in its chain. She painted herself refusing to look away from either.

This answer keeps her gaze and adds to it. A small monkey now sits at her other shoulder, drawn from Kahlo's own menagerie and her own canvases, and the whole scene is pulled out of pure black rather than paint, so the story is carried by what catches the light and what the dark keeps for itself.

Her face holds almost all of it. A field of fine scratches gathers across the brow, the braided crown and the set of her mouth until she seems made of light rather than lit by it, calm and unflinching at the center of the dark.

The cat gives almost none of that light back. It sits as a near total silhouette at her shoulder, cut whole from the black, only its eyes left burning. The monkey answers from the other side, its small face caught almost as brightly as hers, while the thorn necklace and its hummingbird survive as the faintest pale threads at her throat and the broad leaves behind her hold their shape only at the edges, dark forms framing her and nothing more.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is held in the surface of the acrylic glass itself, formed by controlled scratches rather than any pigment, a field of individual marks that is always present, in daylight as much as under a single raking beam. Light does not create this face. It sharpens it, and the contrast deepens the longer it is given.

Frida Risen From the Dark belongs to In Tribute, a series within Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, and in which that same damage becomes a way of meeting a remembered image face to face again, from a quieter angle, and finding what in it still refuses to look away.

"She was always made of what she survived."

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