Frida Kahlo: The Artist as Therapist

Journals, letters and so many self portraits; through Frida Kahlo’s art we see the trauma of her physical pain interwoven with sequences of dream-like navigation within her internal struggles. Other works show a nightmarish reality dealing with doomed love and babies lost.

One wonders what Frida Kahlo would have done with her time and where she might have focussed her deep need for expression, were it not for painting. During her extensive hospital stays with her bed-mounted easel, or painting her own body cast, she was processing her own grief and medicating herself with art. She was an unwitting Art Therapist; both client and therapist. Psychoanalyst of her own demons, she confronted them with the paintbrush. Unforgiving and raw as her wounds, she depicted in oils what lay beneath her skin; as though she has literally pulled back her flesh and let us in.

Moreover, Frida left behind a legacy with her hauntingly personal portraits, watercolour blood-stained journals and defiance in the face of adversity. Frida continues to teach us almost 60 years after her passing, that life may not heal, but art will try. She teaches us of beauty in the unlikeliest of places and faces, of the poetry in every scar and that no one, no one...knows you as you know yourself.

When we dialogue with the paint, the pen, the canvas, and dip into the madness, there we can know truth. There we can begin to heal. If art cannot heal, then let it at least capture the beauty of our madness!

For many Frida lovers, she inspires in us the ability to heal ourselves, to know oneself, to love blind and to speak our truth. How did Frida heal you?

...life may not heal, but art will try.