Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954)
Mexican painter.
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I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. 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.
I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego.
A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds.
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.
His supposed mythomania is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface.
I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.
She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality.
Pies, para qué los quiero
Si tengo alas para volar.
I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.
If I were a painter, I'd be Frida Kahlo.
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