Mexican born painter Frida Kahlo
“I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution. The only real reason for living.”
Beset with illnesses from earlier tragedy Kahlo often painted while bedridden
Seen here painting a body cast
“I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
The Two Fridas
Sun and Life
“I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.”
Frida Kahlo with husband and fellow painter Diego Rivera
Self-portrait as a Tehuana. Also known as Diego In My Thoughts and Thinking of Diego
“There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”
Self-portrait with Hair Loose
Self-portrait Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”
Always fiercely independent in thought and expression
Love is the territory par excellence of the poetic – which, for Frida, meant that which could not be contained. In her vision of verbal beauty, even new poetic words are justified, as long as the essence (the delivery) remains. Frida writes:”Classical love…/[without arrows]/only/with sperm.” Frida Kahlo has been an exotic fashion and is today the durable synthesis of many distinct realities, as evidenced by her paintings, by the multiple aspects of her life (as artist, invalid, lover, Trotskyist, Communist), and by the various ways in which her work resonates. Frida notes: “You rain me – I sky you,” and this surprising metaphor can be translated to the paintings, in which with supreme vigor it rains, and skies. “Nothing is so natural as painting that which we haven’t achieved.” In Frida case this means the development and multiplicity of the I. In a self-portrait from her diary, Frida, who is depicted as a broken vase, bellows: DON’T CRY FOR ME!, and in the next drawing, she replies: “I WILL CRY FOR YOU!” Pain is the supreme militancy, the cause she embraces and battle, the point of departure, the hell that will abolish death. In her pictorial and written invocation, the I rains down, the I splits and proffers light, the I descends into the penumbra, furnishing it with shape and color. In Frida there is a coexistence of “despair no word can describe,” mockery in the face of death, conflation of memories imagined and true, the solitude of the body imposing itself on the gregarious spirit, the driving need to seize the poetic ( the spirit in full transcendence), and the extraordinary work – the desire to be sustained by what is irrefutably a succession, a bloodline, a landscape of lasting image.