Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter. She was born in 1907, close to the start of the Mexican Revolution.

Her love of her country and pride in its people was very important to her all her life. She is best known

for her self-portraits, made in a simple style with bold colours similar to traditional Mexican Folk Art.

Frida never intended to be a painter. As a teenager she was studying medicine. In a way, she became an

artist literally by accident. When she was eighteen, a trolley car crashed into the bus she was travelling

in. It was a terrible accident and Frida suffered horrific injuries. Her spine, pelvis, collarbone and foot

were so badly damaged that she had to have a lot of surgery and spend many months recovering. It was

while she was recuperating in bed that she started painting to pass the time. She had a specially adapted

easel so that she could paint lying down. She used herself as the model and sometimes used symbols to

represent aspects of her life, thoughts and the pain she was in. But the way she painted her face was not

the way that most ladies would want to be seen. She painted – even exaggerated - her thick, un-plucked

eyebrows and dark downy moustache. These are things that many people would have considered ugly in

a woman, unladylike and mannish. But Frida presented herself as she saw it, creating strong images of

alternative beauty. She wasn’t going to pretend or change her appearance to follow what was expected

of her: Frida was a rebel.

The clothes she wore in her paintings were also an important part of her identity. They looked odd and

old-fashioned. Most stylish women would be wearing elegant dresses and fashionable hairstyles but

Frida showed herself in heavy skirts, shawls, headpieces and ancient Aztec jewellery, a ‘costume’ to sym-

bolise her Mexican heritage and were another symbol of her ‘otherness’ from the conventional norm.

Because much her work was symbolic rather than a literal record of what was actually there, people

started to describe it as Surrealist. Surrealism was an Art Movement that used dream-like images and

the leader of it, French writer Andre Breton, loved Frida’s work. She said ‘I never knew I was a Surrealist

until Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one. I myself don’t know what I am’.

Everything about her was hard to categorise: her work, her appearance and also her sexual orientation.

In 1929 she married the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera. He was the love of her life and their rela-

tionship was passionate and deep. But it was also very stormy and Diego was constantly unfaithful.

Throughout their marriage they both had affairs. Frida had affairs with various men, one of them was the

Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky. She was also romantically linked to several women, some of them

famous, such as the Parisian dancer Josephine Baker, Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio and painter Geor-

gia O’Keeffe.

Her attraction to women is a theme that can be found in

some of her works. ‘Two Nudes in a Forest’ (1939) for

example shows two women, one light-skinned, one dark-

skinned, embracing in an imagined landscape. In another,

she questions traditional gender stereotyping: ‘Self Portrait

with Cropped Hair’ (1940) she portrays herself as a cross-

dressed androgynous figure in an over-sized mans suit,

sitting amongst the severed tresses of her own hair.

She was a maverick, claiming not to paint her dreams or

nightmares but her own reality. Her work articulated her

experiences, emotions and inner thoughts, communicating

the complexities of her life frankly and directly to you and

me.

In her words ‘Well, I hope that if you are out there and read

this and know that, yes, it's true— I'm here... and I'm just as

strange as you.’

Sadie Lee, artist