Celebrate Oz :: Frida Kahlo aLteREd

Oma Linda is having her Oz hop a little earlier this year, and she's changed it up with a touch of Frida. She had me at 'hello' using Frida as inspiration. What a bold, powerful artist she is, and some serious inspiration for color and design. Bring it on.

Check out what she's done with Dorothy! I would know those eyebrows anywhere. Dorthy is Frida aLteREd. 

My blog has been on a bit of a Frida kick lately, which was so serendipitous. A couple of posts back I wrote about a Frida inspired door that a bloggy friend and I found. We were working on a door-themed photo hop that week, but I was thinking in the back of my mind ... aLteREd hop! 

Let's jump a little deeper into the world of Frida. Kahlo was born in Mexico City in 1907. But she gave her birth date as 1910, and not for vanity's sake. She wanted her birth to coincide with the year of the beginning of the Mexican revolution so her life would begin with the birth of modern Mexico. Her work is celebrated in Mexico as emblematic of the country and of it's folk art. She is also celebrated by feminists for her uncompromising depiction of the female form. 

She is; however, best known for her self portraits and said "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best." 

For my Frida inspiration I had to work with color, and red always comes to mind when I think of the Wizard of Oz. Probably due to those ruby slippers. I wanted to create something that Frida might wear. Something bold, perhaps a little folksy, as the jewelry she wore was so ahead of her time. 

She wore a lot of large earrings, which by today's standard are nothing all that wild but likely were for the early 1990s. You see her wearing earrings in many of her self portraits.

The beads I chose are cinnabar. I saw them and knew immediately I had found what I wanted for this project. I love the rich red color these have. After a quick search I found that cinnabar is a deep red stone which is a red crystalline from mercury sulfide. And since it is mercury based you need to be careful handling it as it is highly toxic. Yowza. Andre Breton, a fellow surrelist, said in 1938 that Kahlo's art was a "ribbon around a bomb."  Just like cinnabar ... a beautiful red rock giving off a crystal sparkle but you would not want to pick that baby up with your bare hands!

The commonly called cinnabar beads are actually a laquer from tree sap found in China used as a stain on hand carved wood beads. That is what I've used here. I figured no one needed to get hurt in the name of fashion. I used a linen cord and wood beads for one pair, and hemp cord with Chinese coins and onyx in the second pair. You can find both pairs listed in my Etsy shop, and you can find the rest of the participants in the hop over at Linda Oma's blog. So hop on over!