My Newest Inspiration and Wonder Woman, Frida Kahlo

 "I never painted dreams. I only painted my own reality."

      These are the words of Frida Kahlo, a passionate and influencial artist who lived in the early 1900s, and who is my new inspiration for art.  I've been starting to admire her work, looking at the intense emotion and care and anger that she put into her paintings.  The symbolism and the sad parallelism that they have to her life astonish me.  It's hard to believe that one woman can put so much of herself onto a single canvas.

     Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, in her parent's house, known as La Casa Azul, or The Blue House. This house now holds many of her paintings, and you can go visit it today to admire some of her work that's there.  At the age of six, Frida's life long medical problems began when she developed polio, which caused her right leg to look much thinner than the other.  It was to stay that way for the rest of her life.  In 1925, when Frida was a teenager, a bus she was riding in collided with a trolley car and she was severely injured.  She suffered from a broken spine, collarbone, ribs and pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, and a crushed and dislocated right foot and shoulder.  These continued to pain her for the rest of her life.  Also, an iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which made her never to be able to have children.  After the accident, she had to stay indoors for about three months, where she started to paint.  She realized how she could escape from the pain by this.  The result were many beautiful and haunting pictures.

      Most of Frida Kahlo's paintings were of herself or of fruit. The ones of herself were much more intriguing to me though. (the fruit weren't as haunting, though they were quite beautiful) It surprises me as I look at one of her paintings when I see how striking the composition is. It always has a hint of a darker mind behind it, even if it's supposedly an initially happy painting at first glance.  Here is one of my favorite paintings of hers.  (it's above ^^^)

In this self-portrait, called Memory, Frida finds a pictorial way to show the anguish that she suffered during the affair between her husband, Diego Rivera and her sister Cristina.  Her broken heart lies at her feet and its enormous size symbolizes the intensity of her pain. She illustrates her feelings of helplessness and despair through her lack of hands. Her face, though tearful, is expressionless.  The foot placed over water wears what looks like a tiny sailboat and may refer to her recent foot operation at the time. The hole left by Frida's extracted heart is pierced with a steel rod and seesawing cupids sit on either end. The greater the pain Frida wishes to show, it seems the bloodier her self-portraits become.  And they do get bloodier.  Here is another, called The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.   (it's above  ^^^)  Now, this one, isn't of Frida, but of a well known actress and stage-girl of this time, Dorothy Hale.  And apparently this woman didn't have a happy life, because, as Frida paints it, Mrs. Hale throws herself from the top of a very tall hotel, and dies.  Frida turned the event into a beautiful, heartbreaking and bloody painting.  This is another of my favorites of hers, I guess I just find it really interesting that one can paint another's death and turn it into a masterpiece.

        Well, I don't really know how to end this report, except to say the obvious:  Frida Kahlo's images will probably stay with me forever.  Their haunting faces and alluring compositions aren't the average painting to hang on a wall in your house, but that just means that Frida wasn't a normal person.  She had a much harder life than I ever thought was humanly possible, but she did not let it ground her whatsoever.  She soared in and through all her art, and the result... Well it was magnificent.