Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter. She was born in 1907, close to the start of the Mexican Revoluon. Her love of her country and pride in its people was very important to her all her life. She is best known for her self-portraits, made in a simple style with bold colours similar to tradional Mexican Folk Art. Frida never intended to be a painter. As a teenager she was studying medicine. In a way, she became an arst literally by accident. When she was eighteen, a trolley car crashed into the bus she was travelling in. It was a terrible accident and Frida suffered horrific injuries. Her spine, pelvis, collarbone and foot were so badly damaged that she had to have a lot of surgery and spend many months recovering. It was while she was recuperang in bed that she started painng to pass the me. She had a specially adapted easel so that she could paint lying down. She used herself as the model and somemes used symbols to represent aspects of her life, thoughts and the pain she was in. But the way she painted her face was not the way that most ladies would want to be seen. She painted – even exaggerated - her thick, un-plucked eyebrows and dark downy moustache. These are things that many people would have considered ugly in a woman, unladylike and mannish. But Frida presented herself as she saw it, creang strong images of alternave beauty. She wasn’t going to pretend or change her appearance to follow what was expected of her: Frida was a rebel. The clothes she wore in her painngs were also an important part of her identy. They looked odd and old-fashioned. Most stylish women would be wearing elegant dresses and fashionable hairstyles but Frida showed herself in heavy skirts, shawls, headpieces and ancient Aztec jewellery, a ‘costume’ to sym- bolise her Mexican heritage and were another symbol of her ‘otherness’ from the convenonal norm. Because much her work was symbolic rather than a literal record of what was actually there, people started to describe it as Surrealist. Surrealism was an Art Movement that used dream-like images and the leader of it, French writer Andre Breton, loved Frida’s work. She said ‘I never knew I was a Surrealist unl Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one. I myself don’t know what I am’. Everything about her was hard to categorise: her work, her appearance and also her sexual orientaon. In 1929 she married the famous Mexican arst Diego Rivera. He was the love of her life and their rela- onship was passionate and deep. But it was also very stormy and Diego was constantly unfaithful. Throughout their marriage they both had affairs. Frida had affairs with various men, one of them was the Russian Revoluonary Leon Trotsky. She was also romancally linked to several women, some of them famous, such as the Parisian dancer Josephine Baker, Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio and painter Geor- gia O’Keeffe. Her aracon to women is a theme that can be found in some of her works. ‘Two Nudes in a Forest’ (1939) for example shows two women, one light-skinned, one dark- skinned, embracing in an imagined landscape. In another, she quesons tradional gender stereotyping: ‘Self Portrait with Cropped Hair’ (1940) she portrays herself as a cross- dressed androgynous figure in an over-sized mans suit, sing amongst the severed tresses of her own hair. She was a maverick, claiming not to paint her dreams or nightmares but her own reality. Her work arculated her experiences, emoons and inner thoughts, communicang the complexies of her life frankly and directly to you and me. In her words ‘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.’ Sadie Lee, arst