Frida Kahlo v. Van Gogh

Uladzimir Dabravolski 

Professor Ding

Eng 2150: Writing II

Oct 13, 2023

Rhetorical analysis

 The artworks I picked for rhetorical analysis are the self-portrait made by Frida Kahlo “Fulang-Chang and I” and the  self-portrait made by Vincent van Gogh (here I need to point out that assignment never told us to use only painting and artifacts presented in MOMA, it only been said that they must be of the same medium and genre, never a museum.)

   Well, if I’m going to think about the reason why I picked those artists, not the name of a painting caught my attention, but rather the names of the artists. I’m a human being who is as far from art as I’m from the moon; so the artists who I know something about, who were producing their artworks in similar periods of time and have artworks of the same genre, make the variety of my search very thin. So the artists I stopped on were Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, and I know both of them were making self-portraits in Modern art style.

  As there is no text in the artworks, I will skip it and proceed straight to colors and composition. Van Gogh mainly uses a cold blue color for the background and his clothes. Usually blue represents things like sadness, depression and loneliness, however it might also symbolize personality traits such as rationality and calmness. So out of this I can make an analysis that based on his color choice he is trying to show that his life is not really happy, he feels sad, however he still kept some beige(I don’t know how to call it the best way) color which shows that he still keeps himself on something away from sadness and depression. Based on composition, I can see that his coat’s color isn’t very different from the background. The coat is his property so this might symbolize that his property isn’t his anymore. However, his brush, palette and head have similar colors and it shows that he still has his head and he is working to go forward. Van Gogh’s eyes pointed at a viewer, in a style like “What do you want?” or “What do you think?”, like asking why people are thinking about him and his work. His expression is calm and emotionless, he shows his lack of interest in a viewer, like he doesn’t care about people who watch him. If we look on it, the blue lines on a background form some kind of “nimbus” or “cocoon” around Van Gogh to kinda separate himself from others, like he wants to stay alone and continue doing what he was doing. So out of composition, I can say he is trying to build a fence around “Van Gogh”, so he  could continue painting, and don’t care what things are going around and so the other people don’t interact with him as he is painting. 

  On the contrary, Frida Kahlo’s  painting was made with soft colors, expressing that everything is okay, there is nothing really bad going around, she is doing good, and all things like that. However there is no feeling that things are going wonderful, the green color she uses is a kind of one which appears when a leaf loses most of its moisture and is not far from its end. Frida Kahlo composition is made up to show what she got and she is not afraid and wants to share it with people of what she got. She doesn’t hide her monobrow like she was not afraid of what she is doing. On her hands we see a monkey with the same hair color as Frida’s hair is. Frida Kahlo was unable to have kids so she is kinda trying to  personificate the monkey, to make this monkey “her child”, to feel like she is the mother who came on a vacation with her family. So as a result she didn’t want to be alone. Drawing a self-portrait might mean that she got no one other to paint, that she is alone or other things don’t deserve her attention.