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  • Essay / The Power of Art to Reach Out to the Community: Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol

    The paintings I chose for my essay are Tree of Hope by Frida Kahlo and Campbell's Soup Can by Andy Warhol. It was the paintings that really caught my interest because both artists seemed to speak to me with their works. These paintings helped me understand the power of art to speak to your community and the media. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an original essayIn Frida Kahlo's painting Tree of Hope, the first thing I noticed was the stark contrast between the sides left and right of the table. There are two Fridas in the painting and the one on the left is lying on a hospital bed. She used this to represent the trauma she had to endure after getting into a car accident. Two deep bloody scars are visible on his back and they caught my attention. I noticed the scars right away because they seemed to inflict a lot of physical and mental pain on him. Before her accident, she was a bright student who aspired to attend medical school. This accident changed the entire course of his life. A vertical line divides the two-dimensional painting into two spaces. On the right side of the painting we see an incredibly beautiful, confident Frida dressed in traditional clothing. She holds up a sign that says "Tree of Hope, Stay Strong" and this tells us that she intends to keep her head held high despite all the agony she has been through. She can also be seen holding a corset which reminds us that the accident affected her body and that she will need a corset for the rest of her life. The left side of the painting is bright as the sun shines on the hospitalized Frida. She seems to feed the sun with her sacrificial blood according to an Aztec ritual. The right side is dark and the moon shines on it. The moon is a metaphor for her femininity and strength. This painting sparked my imagination because although at first it seemed to be a negative or sad work, upon closer inspection I discovered that this work represents Frida's courage in the face of tragedy. This seems to be a message to the audience telling them to stay strong and see the positives in every situation. I believe that Frida painted with a lot of emotion and this painting shows us how mixed human emotions can be. I believe this painting was made to express his feelings and to inspire the audience to look for a glimmer of hope even in the darkest of times. Some might find the bright side of the picture disturbing, but the dark side is a beacon of hope for anyone suffering from mental or physical pain. Andy Warhol's painting Campbell's Soup Can was appealing to me because it seemed to give me an almost calming and friendly feeling. This could be because canned soup is a comfort food and one we consume quite frequently. Familiarity is something that helped me relate to this painting. The first thing in this painting that caught my attention was the effort the artist put into making the tin can realistic and detailed. The red color used extensively also suggests that the can contains tomato soup. Warhol painted thirty-two different flavors of soups that represented the thirty-two products sold by Campbell at the time. This tells us that Warhol worked like a machine to produce all these paintings, similar to the machines in factories that package soup. He used vertical and curved lines to represent the can. White spaces are seen liberally, which mimics the corporate art of the 1960s. At first.