2.1.5 Frida Kahlo My Inspiration
Frida Kahlo was born July 6th 1907 in Coyoacàn Mexico, she suffered with several physical disabilities, Spine Abifida and Polio. She was a self taught painter, a big inspiration to me. When she was 17 she was in an accident involving a bus after which she was fully confined to a bed for several years but she kept on painting anyway. Frida and I have alot in common, we have a deep routed love for nature, flowers, we are both dependant of assitants with our daily needs, we like to find solutions to overcome the artistic problems we face every day and we both love monkeys. Frida had several monkeys in her home, I myself had a chimpanzie in the institution where I lived when I was 7 years old. I used the monkey as my assistants, he peeled my fruit and helped me to drink by taking the cup out of the fridge and passing it to me when I was in my bed. It is possible that Frida used her monkeys in the same way. I know that nowadays disabled people use monkeys as there assistant, an example of this is in Boston America where an organisation called helping hands trains monkeys to take over tasks in every day life like helping a person with a disability to drink, to turn on a light switch, to wash someones face and to generally help in any light function the person might have a problem wih doing, they are wonderful companions. At the end of this text you will find links that inspired me to write and to adapt my equipment, I hope they are as useful to you as they were to me.
Before Frida was involved in the accident she started a medical study to become a doctor which gave her a broad knowledge of healing with the use of plants and flowers. Later on she used this in her paintings as symbols of love and hate. If she hated you she would draw a colourful and vibrant poisionous flower. In her self portraits she used short living flowers because she new she would have a short life on this earth. She prefered to draw her direct surroundings and her own experience. I admire her power and her clearness of mind. She also drew her hospital experiences which was very recognisable to me as I did the same when I was in hospital.
What I found a pity was that historians always looked at her work through the lense of her disability for example the portrait of herself with the monkeys,the monkeys was said to be painted there because they were much more flexible than herself because she had a disability, but could it not be just that her monkeys were her companions which she saw every minute of the day, she saw them being naughty and she saw their joy and wanted to put it in a painting. The same is true with the painting of the angel with the straw wings holding a spanish aeroplane in her hands. I don't think she drew this painting with the angel attached to the ground because of her physical limitations it is much more likely she wanted to keep the angel attached to the earth because she wanted it to protect the refugees from the spanish civil war. Frida actually at the moment of this painting was keeping refugees safe in her house from the spanish civil war. I wonder how you can prevent historians from making this kind of statement, would it maybe of been better that they did not know of her disability so they could appreciate the beauty of her art for what it is or should she have written more about the motivations of her drawings so that interpretations could not be made so easily.
These are questions I ask myself when looking at her work because I find it beautiful in its own right. I am fascinated by the fact of how she sees nature and the circle of life and how it starts all over again. I am also impressed by how she finds solutions to overcome her disabilty and the fact that she is confined to her bed, for example she made a painting easel for her bed so that she could keep on painting when she was laying down and made another easel for when she was in her wheelchair. Frida Kahlo sadly died at the age of 47, for me she was a short bluming flower but a flower that bloomed so bright. It was very useful how she made her adaptions to painting because I now use some of them in my work. I created a painting easel to use in several positions, in my bed, in my hand chair and my electric chair standing up. It is very useful for me that I can now change my positions so that I can divide my energy better and can paint in any position I want and give the painting a different flow in each position.
