Why Tumblr should Fall In Love with Frida Kahlo.
YES OMFG
YESi love everything about this because i love frida kahlo, but how are you going to not list the fact she was in a horrible bus accident that basically crippled her for most of her life and while lying bedridden she began to paint. frida kahlo didn’t give up and that makes her truly amazing.
Every single Frida Kahlo appreciation post Ive seen egregiously neglects the fact that she endured and survived a car accident that resulted in a metal pole being shoved through her body and essentially destroying her uterus. This incident informed many of her paintings and depictions of herself and yet she did not allow it to end herself. Her paintings became monuments to and representations of her suffering that she freely, openly and powerfully expressed. She painted her reality defying not only conventional beauty norms and continuing to slay anyways, but also artistic norms. While others considered her works surreal, she adamantly stood her ground saying that they were not surreal at all; that they were 100% accurate and realistic depictions of her suffering. And I think for someone to turn life crippling tragedy into the worlds most recognized self portraits is pretty badass and worth appreciating.
Yeah, her disability was CRUCIAL to her life as an artist— it was while she was recovering from her accident that she began to paint, and she explored self-portrait so thoroughly because it was all she had— she had a mirror over her bed and paints, and she used art as a way to cope with the MASSIVE amount of pain she was in and the fact that just as she was (I’ve seen sources that say 16 and others that say 19 but that age range), her whole world was reduced to suffering in a bed, for a very long time.
For that matter, she was not perfectly able-bodied before her accident because of childhood illness, but after the accident… She had her youth stolen, and she rebelled against being seen as an invalid, as being reduced to her suffering (the way that disabled people are STILL viewed), and she presented herself in her own terms in part to throw in the faces of those who presumed to narrow her down to the image of what they thought a ‘sick woman’ was/should be.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
