Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo one of México’s famous woman painter reflects her life in all her paintings. Throughout her life she never intended to become an artist until a terrified incident marked her life forever and her career began. Due to this incident To combat the boredom of the bed in which she was in most of her life for a various reasons such as surgeries , miscarriages,  and abortions she  kept herself busy by sketching and  painting things that surpass her life. She used painting as a way to express her inner and outer feelings. Frida is well recognized because all her paintings are a biography, a picture of an episode in her life. She influences her art to speak by itself, through the combination of different symbols and colors.  Many of these were self-portrait of herself symbolizing the way she felt in that particular occasion of her life good or bad she would paint her heart on a canvas, or as she once said "I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality...” A painting which I find very interesting is, “What the water gave her” This painting is one of Kahlo’s most visionary and disturbing; the sophisticated water fantasy provides the vehicle for a densely-packed portrayal of the artist’s subconscious. It’s almost as if she crammed her entire life into this bathtub scene.  Kahlo returned to the same symbols over and over; many of the items included here can be seen in her other paintings, some without much alteration.  An example of a symbol Frida uses are her toes, they emerge from the water pointing up, but also, through the device of reflection, pointing back at the “events” of her life. To me this painting is like a full book of her life it has many symbolic pictures that give the audience visual scenes of what she went through in her life.  It’s interesting how this artist went thru so much but yet always managed to put everything on canvas for her audience to visualize her exact emotions of her existence.