Frida Kahlo:
Queen of mystery, love and…pain
When I was young, my mother advised me a million times to paint and do other extracurricular activities in order to enrich my personality. I had tried too, a million times. Nothing interested me. I was coerced to join a painting class near my house but the austerity of the circles and straight lines were the biggest turn-off . The kaleidoscope of the monotony coalesced with the dark age that these art schools bear. So yes, I found a more compact reason to not paint. Years later, I was watching this movie about this famous artist who I had heard about before but never was enthusiastic enough to drown myself in her biography. After one glance into her paintings, I had become one of her greatest fans, followers. Frida Kahlo de Rivera, born as Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, was born in July 1907 in Coyocoán, Mexico City, Mexico. But because she wanted to coincide her birthdate with the birth of modern Mexico, she had given it as July 1910, the beginning of the Mexican revolution. All her life she was locked by the worst of obstacles- --- polio at the age of six which had deformed her right leg and foot, a traffic accident that had given her serious injuries and fractured her pelvis, spine, ribs and collarbones and the constant emotional roller-coaster. And finally came the time when a blatant twist in her fate changed her entire course; she was preparing to be a doctor in the Escuela National Preparatoria. In fact she was one of the thirty-five who were selected out of the two thousand students but because she had to acquiesce to the harsh reality, she lay bed-ridden after myriad operations. Frida, daughter of the German Hungarian-Jewish Guillermo Kahlo (born as Carl Guillermo Kahlo) and an Amerindian/Spanish mother, was the third of four daughters. Her life had started, been lived and ended in the famed Blue house, La Casa Azul. Even as a child, she was bereft of mother's proper care because soon after her birth Matilde got so sick that she couldn't even feed her milk. So she had to be breast-fed by an Indian wet-nurse. All these affixed to her life-long afflictions and conduced to her artworks immensely. "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality", she said. Most of Frida's extraordinary pieces were greatly influenced by her co-member, friend and patron --- her husband, the famous muralist Diego Rivera. He was the reason for the pursuit of her career as an artist. Frida had accosted him at the Public Ministry of Education where she had shown him her paintings and Diego had told her that she had talent. That's when she took it rather seriously. Painting later on became her closest companion at the time of her immobilization. The most eye-smacking truth about her painting was how rudely she had expressed each of her moments against the roughness of the canvasses . "It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography", a local critic had noted after Frida's first exhibition in her hometown. Within the artistic color-smeared stroke of her brush, there are the most deepening gashes of her life. It may start from her painting 'Diego and Frida' which she had gifted Diego on their 15th anniversary. The painting had two faces and one head connected by a scallop and conch which is their love-union, their unitary soul that had been connected to the moon which shows that they were made for each other. 'Henry Ford Hospital' was painted in 1932 when she had suffered a miscarriage, another addition to her grave misfortunes, which had depicted her painful thirst through a large tear in her left eye. In this painting, she is lying on a blood-smeared sheet. There are six floating images related to her miscarriage which are connected by red-blood filaments, supposedly the umblical cords. The main floating image which is a formed male fetus is her little lost inhabitant 'Dieguito'. Each of her painting is a living moment, a flagrant proof of her existence. Frida did 200 paintings, drawing and sketches all her life. And out of the 143 paintings she had done, 55 are her self-portraits. As she said, 'I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.' She painted to satiate her soul. One of them, 'Tree of Hope, remain strong' quenches my zeal for life so enormously because in the painting I had seen her bravery in dealing with all the terrible misfortunes that could have paralyzed anyone in her place. In this painting, there are two Fridas- one wrapped in a white cloak lying on the hospital trolley, and the other is the strong, confident Frida. The bleeding body on the trolley is related to the sun because in Aztec mythology, the sun is fed by sacrificial human blood. The confident Frida is linked to the moon, a symbol of womanhood. Frida's painting is not breath-taking only for the callow cadence of Aztec myths, the prominent influence of Mexican culture or the addition of numerous components of reality that we can relate to our lives, pain, emotions. It is the graphical representation of her undictated biography. Most of her paintings gyrate around Diego, miscarriages and the numerous appalling operations Frida, the painter of reality, the painter of emotions and agony, always held up her head high with confidence, painted because she needed to, lived her life. She had the worst of adversities starting from her polio, mental and physical accidents, infidelities from the person who she considered her child, her soulmate to her short painful life-time, but the uni-brow Frida, the most loved daughter of her father, never stopped painting. She endured and painted…got hurt and painted… that was her life. But only did she mention before her death when she was asked what should be done with the dead body . . . . 'Burn it…I don't want to be buried. I have spent too much time lying down…Just burn it!'
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