Frida Kahlo: "Feet, What do I Need You for When I Have Wings to Fly?" (NSFW)

Made by Natmir Lura

First I learnt about Frida from the excellent movie "Frida" where Salma Hayek played the main character. The movie was really fantastic and impressed me so much that I decided to learn more about this artist.

When I saw a painting "Roots" I was crying as at that time I had struggled through some severe health problems. And that painting depicted how I felt (at least as I understood it). Frida's experience, her strength and wish to live encouraged me not to give up.

Roots

The life of Frida is a story full of tragedies, fights, love and betrayal. She depicted all it in her paintings. When you look at her paintings your heart shrinks from pain . When you look at her paintings you have a feeling you become skinless and her pain is eating you. And you feel what she felt. I have the same feelings when I see skin burns. I feel the pain from burn physically even if another person has it. I have the same when I see her paintings.

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, on the outskirts of Mexico City, on the 6th of July in 1907. When she was 6, she had poliomyelitis and as a result she walked with a limp all her life as one leg was several centimeters shorter than the other. Kids teased her but it just made her stronger. Frida played soccer and was even going for boxing. She hid the defect with trousers or long national skirts later. She entered medical college and was already painting at that time. But it was just a hobby.

Everything changed when she met an artist Diego Rivera in 1923. She was much younger than him but was very fond of him. She told everybody that she would got married to him and it happened but before she had to go through one of the biggest tragedies in her life.

In 1925 she got in accident. The tram rammed into the bus where she was in and a steel stick got into her damaging her uterus, coxofemoral bone. Her spine was broken in 3 spots, her right leg was broken into pieces, ribs were broken.

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She had about 30 surgeries and survived. For the whole year she was bound to bed. Diego Rivera supported her at that difficult time. He taught her painting and was the first who opened her talent.

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Without hope

The romance of Kahlo and Rivera finished with a wedding. She was 22 and he was 43. They had common interests not only in painting but they had the same communists ideals.

Her paintings tell that Diego was constantly in her mind. She expressed the relation with Diego in her paintings.

Diego on My Mind

Diego and Frida

Rivera loved women and cheated on Frida. She knew that but couldn't do anything. She wrote: "I suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down.....The other accident is Diego." The most tragic painting in her life with the sarcastic name is "A Few Small Nips".
Over years she was adding blood spots to the painting and the frame.

A Few Small Nips

Another her tragedy was the incapability to have children after the accident and she expressed that pain in her painting too.

My doll and me

Later Diego was invited to work in the USA where they spent several years. Being far from the motherland she started to feel stronger about the importance of national culture.

Frida was an extravagant and uninhibited person in spite of her sufferings and pain. She smoked, drank, sang bad songs.
Her favourite genre was a self - portraits. She made about 70 portraits and almost all the time she depicted herself in national symbolism. Ideas of her paintings are coded in details, background painted next to her. Frida painted a lot of life- styles with fruits and flowers where she hid her face. All these symbols had close connections with national traditions and Indian mythology. She knew history brilliantly. By painting herself she studied her emotions and feelings and her works tell her story better than any biography. "I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."

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Two Fridas

In 1937 Leon Trotsky, a Soviet revolutionary, found shelter in Mexico, in the house of Diego and Frida. There were gossips that Kahlo and Trotsky had a relationship. In one of the story Leon fell in love with Frida and she, being attracted to communist ideas, couldn't refuse to such a big legend. But the wife of Trotsky stopped that romance, there was a scandal and they left.

Self - portrait devoted to Leon Trotsky

In 1939 works of Frida were first shown in Europe. They had great success and one painting was even bought by the Louvre. At the same time Frida's health worsened, strong pain killers didn't help and changed her state of mind.

In 1950 she had a surgery again and after she could move only with a wheel - chair. Later she lost her right leg.

In 1954 Frida Kahlo died from lung inflammation. Some friends thought it was a drug overdose but there was no proof of that.

I think she was a great woman and talented artist with a very difficult life but who encouraged others not to give up and do what they mean to do in spite of difficulties. She also encouraged people who don't have severe problems to stop whining and start valuing what they have.

"My painting carries with it the message of pain.....Painting completed my life.....I believe that work is the best thing."

The Wounded Deer

Sources:
http://zagopod.com/blog/43712350509/Kto-takaya--Frida-Kalo--i-pochemu-o-ney--stolko-shuma
http://www.artcontext.info/pictures-of-great-artists/66-art-of-america-latin/305-frida-kalo.html
https://www.google.ru/search?q=frida+kahlo+accident&newwindow=1&biw=1600&bih=721&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjE7-Toh-zPAhWiNJoKHfujCskQ_AUIBigB#newwindow=1&tbm=isch&q=frida+kahlo+quotes

Yours, @aksinya.