"Painting completed my life." - Frida Kahlo

"My painting carries with it the message of pain...Painting completed my life...I believe that work is the best thing ..."
- Frida Kahlo

"Painting completed my life." wrote Frida Kahlo.

Mine too. I agree with Kahlo that "work is the best thing."

Frida knew that the work was the thing.

"...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 consideration..."

-Frida Kahlo


Frida painted her own reality so passionately that anyone can see their own reality in the deep humanity of her art.

When Frida traveled to the U.S. and lived briefly in New York City while her husband muralist Diego Rivera painted a mural payed for and later destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller, she painted her own statement on the imperialist consumer culture she found in the United States and wrote, "Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism" Frida Kahlo. * (See note below.)

The more people talk about bringing change, the bigger "Criminal Yankee Capitalism" gets no matter which party is in control, and the Democrat President Obama deploys tens of thousands U.S. Troops to Afghanistan and increases bombing forays into Pakistan.

Frida Kahlo's art was recognized for its brilliance long after her death. During her life, the joy the art gave Frida was from the passion of painting and making her reality real for her and others to see. Her paintings are fresh today because she painted her deepest truths and revealed human truths we all recognize.

by Charleen Touchette
_____________________________
Note - "Rivera remained a controversial and politicized figure throughout his career. When in 1933 Nelson Rockefeller decided he wanted a mural for the new RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, New York, he commissioned Diego Rivera (after receiving refusals from Picasso and Matisse). Thumbing his nose at the Western world’s primary proponent of free enterprise, Rivera chose to depict the modern worker at a symbolic junction of science, industry, capitalism, and socialism in a work provisionally entitled ‘Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future’.

Among several influential world personalities portrayed in the fresco—including Edsel Ford, Jean Harlow, and Charlie Chaplin—Rivera included a figure of Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin. When he steadfastly refused Rockefeller’s request to remove Lenin’s portrait, Rockefeller had the entire fresco chiseled off the wall. Rivera later reproduced the mural in its entirety on an interior wall of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where it can still be seen today." by Joe Cummings © 1999