Portfolio And An Introductory Essay: Rhetorical Analysis

Name Tutor Course Date Portfolio and an Introductory Essay Rhetorical Analysis Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher We find ourselves coursing through life with tunnel vision, sometimes forward, occasionally backward, and recklessly in the moment. We remain selfish, self-evident, and unapologetic, all in the chase of the most amazing. I shall talk about Frida Kahlo, one whose paintings are brazenly in touch with her reality, and even more so, herself. “I paint self-portraits,” Frida Kahlo once said, “because I am the person I know best, I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.” She produced some 70 self-portraits. Apprehensive, effervescent pieces that captured her continued progression as an artist and as a person. To live, to have loved and lost, were all sources of inspiration for her work. Most would assume that what she has produced became one of the turning points for intense and vivid imagery in the 20th century. This Frida Kahlo imagery is what I will be using throughout this essay because she mostly gains fans through her use of imagery to affect pathos, her imagery as a powerful tool in inducing empathy—whether or not she meant to. This is a rhetorical analysis essay of Frida’s “The Broken Column” (1944), to be ushered in by a brief description of “The Two Frida’s” of 1939, highlighting her ingenious use of ethos, or the ethical appeals, and pathos, or the pathetic appeals. Because Frida believes that she paints her own reality, her own emotions, her own experiences, her paintings are accepted by a wide range of audiences because that is how her character shines through. She builds credibility because there is no false pretense that taints her artwork nor her delivery of it. It is pure as it is raw, it is unabashed. On the other hand, she makes use of the pathetic appeals in the fact that it is emotion we see in her paintings straight away, especially in “The Broken Column” where she bore everything, using just the right metaphors to evoke the right emotion properly. Frida uses pathos probably more appropriately than ethos because it just comes naturally to her. Because she has had experienced true, such heartbreaking events in her life, she does not need to use anything other than what she already has in her heart. This has consistently been the root of her work. Frida Kahlo’s life has been tainted a somewhat endless barrage of sorrow which she astoundingly expresses using a medium that we can only say is a true gift from the gods. Pain, something we are all accustomed to a certain degree, in both a literal and figurative sense, has been continuously depicted—mentally, psychologically, physically raw. She is a visual artist, using symbols rooted in her culture and upbringing; that when contextualized into her experiences as a child and as a woman, are thrust into relevance in the modern times. Her appeal is grounded in her ability to evoke emotion and mold it into an existing language, truly her own. The emotion is the pain that she has been so accustomed to. 1938 was a very crucial year for Kahlo as an art...