By Anabella Martinez
Frida Kahlo is one of Mexico’s most well known and well loved artists, this month we are starting a series to highlight her extraordinary, vibrant life and the continued fascination it inspires, here in Mexico and throughout the world.
Frida Kahlo, the flamboyant, internationally renowned Mexican artist of the early to mid twentieth century left a small but very rich legacy of paintings and lived a life full of courage and determination. She was born on July 6, in the year of 1907 in a small provincial town just outside of Mexico City, Coyoacan. She grew up there in the family house “Casa Azul” and it is here her imagination and fantastic sensitivity to life began.
In her diary she says:
I must have been six when I lived intensely an imaginary friendship with a girl more or less my age. In the window of my room in those days on the side of Allende street on one of the window panes, I would opaque it with my breath and draw a door with my finger, through that door my imagination would go out, with great joy and urgency. I was down inside of the earth, where my imaginary friend was always waiting for me. I do not remember her image or her color. But I do know that she was happy, she laughed a lot…with no sound. She was agile and danced as if she were weightless. I followed her in all her movements and while she danced I told her my secret problems. Which ones? I don’t remember. When I came back through the same drawn door in the pane. Whew! …and how long had I been with her? I don’t know it could be a second or thousands of years… I was happy, I would erase the door with my hand and it would disappear. I would run with my secret and my joy to the same place under a cedar tree. I would scream and laugh amazed at being alone with my great
happiness.
In real life she was constantly suffering, in her childhood a disease caused her problems with her right leg resulting in its partial amputation many years later. Further aggravating her physical health was a horrific bus accident she was in while a teenager, which led to numerous operations and years of metal corsets and plaster casts, a life of virtually constant pain and poor health.
In 1925 while recuperating from that accident Frida began to paint. She learned to position a mirror in the canopy of her bed so she could use herself as a subject. Throughout her many periods of hospitalizations and confinement, she resorted to this form of diversion. Even when she was not in bed Frida most frequently painted her own portrait, whether to express her deepest emotions and yearnings or to create a precisely controlled composition of a proud beautiful woman wearing distinctive coiffures and traditional Mexican jewelry and clothing situated in exotic surroundings. Frida explained that she painted herself so frequently because she was all alone, but others saw her obsessive self-portraiture as a means of achieving immortality.
Next month “The Dove and the Elephant”, Frida meets and marries famed muralist Diego Rivera.
Anabella Martinez, is the owner with her husband of Casa Frida B&B and Frida Kahlo museum in Barra de Potosi, www.zihuatanejo.net/casafrida.
December 2002
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