Frida

Today I went into the city to see the exhibit on Frida Kahlo at the SFMOMA. in 5th grade I was doing a project on Diego Rivera (to this day I don't know how I found him) and discovered his wife, Frida, who was infinitely more interesting. Her paintings had an intensity about them that struck my 10 year old eyes. I loved her paintings long before I ever had my heart broken. Now that I've lived a bit and know what love and loss feel like, I love them even more.

I spent the past 18 years staring at these paintings in books, reading her diary, memorizing the stories behind each of her prints and each chapter in her life. As as young girl she thrived on her fathers attention and affection while her mother was chronically exhausted and overbearing. In her teens, she tested the boundaries of gender roles, joining a nearly all boys revolutionary fraternity and dressing in her father's suits for family photos. A trolley accident in which her body was pierced through with a bar handle, entering her lower back and exiting her vagina, left her unable to bear children and bed-bound for months. Before she was 25 she had married Diego. He was a constant adulterer, sleeping with models, revolutionary's wives and her sister. She, in unending physical and emotional pain, turned to other men (and women) in desperate efforts to self-sooth yet remained devoted to her love her entire life. She wore the glorious styles of the Oaxacan women she had grown up with in rich colors and patterns of flowing skirts and home spun tops, meters and meters of lush scarves and ornate hair updos and ornaments. Her blue house was a menagerie of native Mexican plants and animals...

And in this reality she painted. Her constant struggle in love with a man who was "physiologically incapable of commitment" and the bitter war with her "Judas of a body" through the raw and astonishing self portraits as a deer pierced with thorns, a broken column, a murdered wife killed with a "few small nips", a dual personality, bleeding out against her most desperate attempts at survival, her musings in her bath with a view of her scarred right foot and her imagination... her pride, anger and pain as a revolutionary, her devotion to her homeland,her heartbreak at being unable to bear a child.

All of this I saw today, in person, for the first time after 16 years of learning Frida. She and I have scoliosis, chronic back pain, surgery on our right feet, scarred hearts, bouts of desperation, depression. But there is so much life in her work, more than any other artist, and I was finally able to see it today. Ooo and I'm so happy!