Viva La Diva: Frida Kahlo

I knew Frida Kahlo during a video-showing session at college. The girl sit next to me cried so badly as the tape rolled, that her sobs almost covered the video's narration. Indeed Frida's misfortune isn't something that most common people like us who are brought up healthily could imagine.

Born with a congenital problem and later contracted with polio at her childhood, Frida's road was already doomed with hindrance. As if that wasn't enough, she was severely injured in a streetcar accident at the age of 18, from which she not only lost her childbearing ability but was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the rest of her life. She quitted school and began her painting career since her stay at the hospital.

Freda Kahlo's works has never been one of my best picks though. Her expressiveness and the vivid coloured portraits of sadness and pain do deeply nailed in my memory. As a Mexican, her paintings reflects a lot her originality with her frequent use of skulls and exotic animals in the Mexican mythology in terms of intense, saturated colours and dramatic symbolism, and at the same time reveal her physical and psychological wounds (from her miscarriages and constantly tensed relationship with her husband).

It is interesting that not only the Mexican influence, there is also a HInayana essence in Frida's paintings. Many of her works, especially her self-portraits, are having the composition that resembles those of the Tibetian tangkas. Perhaps it was her unique curriculum vitae that made her develop a much stronger desire to liberate herself than ordinary people do.

From her paintings, one could see Frida's even the deepest feelings revealed daringly without reservation. As André Breton, the renowed surrealist theorist in the last century, commented Frida's works as "a ribbon around a bombshell", Frida herself insisted, "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." A man may never understand how miscarriages and the husband's betrayal could impact a woman. Her promiscuous affairs might be an antiseptic for her loneliness and pain. She was only crying out through her works with a normal woman's emotion and sensitivity.


Photo: The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and Senor Xolotl. 1949