RASQACHEPEDIA: FRIDA KAHLO

RASQACHEPEDIA: FRIDA KAHLO

Frida Kahlo, a goddess among men, a woman whose life was so fully lived in both the scope of majesty and travesty in such a short period that her life energy can still be felt to this very day. She was the original Diva and a woman with true friends around the world. Her paintings are free from genre and yet steals from every style she pleased to, post-modern to surreal, and the master of the portrait. Her uniqueness separated her from humanity while attracting so much of it to her, eager to experience the world through her eyes, but she forever belongs to her physical and emotional deformities, and to a life that never could have been.

Frida was a master of turning pain into beauty and she had so much pain to paint with. She suffered from polio before puberty, a life threatening bus accident to welcome her into adulthood, endless surgeries, a removed foot, and an endless heartbreak at the hands of her own bravery to try to claim Diego Rivera, a beast too wild to tame, for her own. The result was an autobiography of paintings which depicted the details of her pain with childlike playfulness and real-life intensity. Viewing her paintings is like drifting through her dreams and nightmares, the dialogue we all have in our heads, spoken in color.

Frida was also a woman who lived the life she wanted to life, no matter what anyone said or thought of her. Frida was a shear force of nature. She went and approached Diego Rivera as a teenager, a larger than life personality, and seduced him all the way into marriage. She made legions of women in the U.S. jealous of her Mexican flair, celebrity lifestyle, and unbound originality. She traveled through Europe having affairs with men and women from across the art world and broadening her own vision as an artist. With the help of an eclectic circle of friends, she pulled off successful galleries in New York, Paris, and finally back in her home, Mexico City, an opening she arrived to still in bed because she was too weak to arrive any other way. With every tragedy in her way and a life that was cut short, Frida still found a way to live the life she wanted to live and lived it to the fullest at every moment, no matter how much pain caved in on her.