Frida Kahlo Essay

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Throughout history, time has witnessed the rise of many great artists with different styles of creativity. Though each artist- whether a painter, photographer, or sculptor- comes from a unique background, they all share the same similarity of making an impact in the artistic world. As an eccentric painter, Frida Kahlo became one of these memorable artists. Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was a Surrealist painter whose talent is not only displayed through her still-lifes and portraits, but also through her numerous bold and striking self-portraits that significantly emphasized her own tragic reality. Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Mexico City, Mexico in the suburb of Coyoacan. Kahlo’s life “begins and ends in the same place” (Herrera 3) – a small blue house her own father had built in 1904. She was one of six children born to Guillermo and Matilde Kahlo, but it was always clear she was her father’s favorite child. In fact, Guillermo stated that Kahlo was “the most intelligent of my daughters” for “she is the most like me” (qtd. in Herrera 18). Kahlo would later owe her “marvelous” (qtd. in Herrera 20) childhood to her father’s influence. As a painter and photographer himself, Guillermo would be the first to spark his daughter’s interest in art. Kahlo accompanied her father to local parks, painting her surroundings in watercolor and sharing in her father’s “curiosity about, and passion for, all manifestations of nature” (Herrera 18). Guillermo had also taught Kahlo to retouch, color, and develop photographs. After her father’s death, Kahlo would compare his photographs to her paintings. Whereas he took photographs of his actual reality, she painted the reality in her head. At the age of six, Kahlo fell ill with a bout of poliomyelitis, or polio. This disease not only left her bedridden for nine months, but also with a withered right leg and foot. As a result,

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