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I was reading my favorite comic book about 20 years ago when I first got turned on to the artistic work of Diego Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera has an enduring connection to Detroit in the form of neck-achingly large and exotic frescoes that cover the walls to the ceiling in a marble courtyard named after him in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Frida was here living with him when he painted these, bringing him lunch in daintily-covered woven baskets in her trademark Tehuana dress with long skirts ending in a wide ruffle to the ground. Anyway. Frida had painted over the years a series of canvases that range from wryly erotic to dreamily surrealistic (a label she emphatically denied) to train-wreck morbid to blatantly self-obsessed, and all of it just as gorgeous and colorful as an armload of fresh-cut flowers. There were certain paintings that focused unblinkingly on injuries sustained from a streetcar accident that left her legs and spine crushed and shattered, resulting in a lifetime of operations and plaster castings. One of her feet was eventually amputated. Despite years of ongoing pain and suffering, she managed to live an extraordinary life, as an active member of the Communist Party, meeting with Picasso and other artistic contemporaries in Paris, selling paintings to the rich and famous (Edward G. Robinson was one buyer). having affair after voracious affair with men (Leon Trotsky?!!) and women alike (the women were often her husband’s lovers). And through it all, she painted…herself, primarily. A common theme was Frida’s tears of suffering upon a defiantly expressionless face, staring out point-blank at the viewer with a beauty that transcended emotional/physical pain, a host of medical horrors and, ultimately, death itself.

What draws me to Frida’s work? She was, in a sense, a poster child for narcissism and neediness, neither of which particularly appeals to me. But when I look at her paintings, something inside me responds, the demon that prods me with his gentle dagger to want to produce something, something of my own, something that is unique to me and to hell with anyone who doesn’t like it or doesn’t get it or sticks me in a mental gulag with whatever others they find similarly distasteful or extremist. And, Frida, I wish it could have been painting, really I do, but it’s going to have to be a blog. Words are my pigments, web pages my canvases. My eternal thanks for your prodigious powers of inspiration, querida. Rest in peace, and leave the war on suffering to the living.