Photographed at the 2025 Poet Artist Collaboration
Red Wing Arts
Red Wing Minnesota
Friday April 18th, 2025
Artist: Katherine Gotham
Oil
Artist Comment: The poem "Painting Frida" does a wonderful job of capturing the mix of dedication and inspiration that drives both the artistic process and perhaps life itself.
The poem begins as a kind of still-life painting that sets the scene with a collection of vividly described objects, Many of which i incorporate into my painting "Waiting Not-So-Patiently."
The poem is rich with growing living plants that I visually connected to form an arc above Frida's head. I chose to position the butternut squash next to the blank paper and pen because both are waiting "not-so-patiently" for those mysterious "chemical reactions" to occur.
And the paint-by-number portrait of Frida emerges from an open frame to show how painting Frida again and again transforms her into a living presence in the room. A living Frida that encourages us all to love and accept ourselves more and more.
Poem: Painting Frida
Poet: Amelia Colwell
My room of one's own
has a purple paint streak across the table,
Half a dozen butternut squash
ripening side by side,
their chonky squash butts
gently nudging one another,
reflecting tiny chemical reactions back and forth
between their butternut skin, ripening
The smell of wet earth and loam
Hedera in two different colors - one green and promising,
the other a deep plum, and through she is closer to death,
she looks the healthiest she's ever been.
I can see why Virginia insisted we get this room
the light slanting in, mid-morning
My kid off to public school on a bus that picked him up five doors down
The house and this room all to myself,
the January work of taking seed inventory
Writing notes from last season: what grew, what died, what challenges remained?
waiting not-so-patiently for May's burst of growth and energy
The smell of wet earth indoors
is alarmingly, stunningly good
The muscari blooms like tiny blue bells
ringing in the water
They're right in front of the heat vent
so it's easy to forget
this precarious life
would wilt and sag, were it, 15 feet to the east.
Just write, they say
It doesn't matter what it's about or how shitty the first draft is.
But do they live alone?
Do their houses ever get silent enough
for the darkest of ideas to surface?
Just paint Frida Kahlo, over and over
they don't say but
Her image is the only female face
in paint-by-number kits
So, I'm painting Fridas one by one
each time loving her face more and more
Poet's Comment: My poem riffs on Virginia Woolf's quote: "A woman must have... a room of her own if she has to write..."
It's about being alone with your thoughts and finding beauty to keep despair from taking over. It's about noticing our ecosystem and seasonal work and rest flows. There is relief in the absence of an external gaze - loving Frida's face and loving your own face as a revolutionary step in healing.
