How do you know you have arrived? How about if google celebrates your birthday with a special google logo in honor of your birthday?
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If you can look past the unibrow and the mustache, Frida Kahlo was one heck of an attractive woman exactly because she exudes confidence and willful neglect for rules of all sorts. She swore all the time, hosted wild parties, sang loudly and told dirty jokes at those parties. By all accounts, she was vibrant, magnetic, despite the pains she lived with, not some metaphysical angst that artists are often plagued with (though I suspect that she experienced that too), but real, physical pains.
She was in a catastrophic bus accident and the damages she suffered included, the worst part, an iron handrail piercing her abdomen, breaking her spinal column in three places and then exiting through her pelvis.
Thus started her tumultuous and fascinating life as an artist who became one of the most prolific painters of her lifetime.
It is ironic that she seemed to be one of the most liberated people, one of the very few who were truly free, when all her life she was plagued with physical pain and suffering.
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Guess which one is the young Frida Kahlo?
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Her own words on why and how she painted are especially resonating as she is remembered today. On her 103rd birthday.
I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
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And in all honesty, the following is my favorite. God, you’ve got to love this woman!
They are so damn “intellectual” and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore… I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those “artistic” bitches of Paris.
– on the European surrealists and specifically Andre Breton in a letter to Nickolas Muray (1939)
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
After seeing the movie biography of Kahlo’s life, I wanted to take the part of me that constantly censors and critiques itself and wring its pink little neck until it turned cyan blue and croaked. She lived in vivid color. Wish I wasn’t so damn yellow.
Nance´s last [type]…Speaks Barrels-Doctor- My Eyes
You know what? I love your comments. Each one of them a gem in its own right.
LOVEEEEEEEEE her! Amazing woman!!
jen´s last [type]…Smile You Are Beautiful-
Indeed!
*ahem* She might be one of my heroes. Ya’ know, in case you couldn’t have guessed that already.
Wicked Shawn´s last [type]…Give Me The Volleyball- Or I Am Going To Arrest You
Really? I am so surprised! LOL.
Yep, she was one heck of a woman and very talented.
jj
joanna jenkins´s last [type]…Sundays In My City 41 – I Love A Parade
Very. The fact that she was a talented artist in addition to a fearless human being is what blows me away every time I look at her work.
Thanks for the background — what talent! And, does the mustache/unibrow look ever really go out of style?
NEVER!
AMAZING woman and artist! so awesome you did this tribute to her. i’m slightly obsessed with her life as an artist and her lifelong love of the womanizing painter diego rivera. these two were fierce in all the good ways.
pattypunker´s last [type]…wtf work bathrooms
You know… If you just look at his picture, it’s very hard to imagine Diego Rivera being a womanizer… But then you look at his work, ok, maybe.
It was his passion. I bet he had swagger!!! hehehe Can you imagine what his hands were capable of????? Hello???!!! Okay, I have to go have more sex now.
Wicked Shawn´s last [type]…Puh-Leaze……and F-K U Too Lindsay-
‘k!