i am sassa

Everyone knows Frida as a badass.

She’s usually painted looking straight ahead, right at you, like she’s daring you to look away. I love that Frida. But I wanted to paint her in a way that showed the side of her that I think makes her a real badass. Frida was all that she was, despite a RIDICULOUS SLEW of perfectly good reasons not to be or do anything. I wanted to show some small part of the pain that fueled her. I wanted to focus on her resiliency.

I knew a bit about Frida’s life, but I learned a lot more while painting her today. I’ll link one of the videos I listened to while painting below. Here’s a little bit about her:

Childhood polio left Frida disabled, needing braces on her legs. She was bullied like hell because of it.

When she was 18, she was hit by a bus. The accident broke her pelvic bone, spine, collar bone, shoulder, and her leg…IN ELEVEN PLACES. The rail punctured her abdomen and uterus. She would end up having 35 surgeries due to the accident, and spent much of her life in plaster corsets.

Her husband was a complete turd. Like, cheated on her with her sister level turd. They had a chaotic relationship to say the least.

She wanted a child, badly, but she never had one. Due to health issues, she lost several.

She started painting while bedridden from the accident. She had a full length mirror beside her so that she could paint herself, and she painted her grief and her pain. She painted her lost babies. She painted her broken body and the devastation of her heart. She painted it in a way other people had never seen. She taught herself, she compared herself to no one, and she painted for herself.

Frida painted and talked about things women just didn’t talk about. Infidelity. Lost babies. Sexuality.

She loved fiercely. She was openly bisexual. She wore whatever the hell she wanted. One day, a man’s three-piece suit, the next a floor length traditional Mexican dress and pounds of jewelry. She was a political activist who was not afraid to fight.

Frida arrived at her last exhibition in an ambulance, and enjoyed it from a hospital bed in the middle of the gallery. She died when she was 47 years old.