A few weeks ago I was in the school library with my friend, we were both in the biographies section of the library. I wandered into a shelf full of books about artists and I got very excited, touching the spine of each book. Then i found a thick book with a picture of one of my favorite artists. It was called Frida Kahlo: Painter of Strength. Last year I learned about her life and I studied her paintings, so I was really excited to find a big thick book about her, written about the phenomenal painter herself. I sat down at one of the large comfy couches that was near by. I started to read, and read, fifteen minutes passed and I was bursting with shock and sadness. But at the same time, I was grateful to finally be able to learn and comprehend this lonely renegade artist, who was a fighter at heart. My friend had found me, and when I looked up a single tear rolled down my callused cheek. “What’s wrong?” He asked. I replied just by saying. “Poor, poor, Frida.”
Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907, but sadly at the early age of six, she was diagnosed with polio. Her right leg was extremely shorter and thinner than her left leg. With both of her parents often sick, she described her early life as “very very sad.” Years later, she was coming back from school when a large wood bus crashed with a car, many people killed, but Frida experiences severe injuries, a handrail had gotten impaled right into her pelvis, and she fractured her legs, collarbone, and ribs. When she started to recover, she had unfortunately found out that she was suffering from three displaces vertebrae.
Her dreams of becoming a professional doctor were shattered. But soon her family found an easel that she could use to paint with while in bed. She spent most of her time painting, but she mainly painted her emotion and pain. Her paintings were the only things keeping her together, keeping her alive. She mainly painted self portraits because in this quote she states “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” She painted herself and others) in many different ways. In one painting she depicts herself, but instead of her normal human form, she is a graceful deer. In another, she paints not one but two Frida’s, one in traditional Mexican clothing, the other Frida wearing nontraditional attire. Representing her true and fake self.
What really caught me the most about her, was even through every sorrowful and painful moment in her life, she continued to stay Frida. She continued to be calm, and poured every single tear, every single moment of anger, or fear into her work. Into a series of paintings that is her life.
“I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s – my madness would not be an escape from “reality”.”
– Frida Kahlo
