What do you do when you get hit by a bus?
Scream.
Getting hit by a bus is thrown about as morbid motivation, along with getting struck by lightning or squished under a tree.
Frida was only 18 when Life hit her with that proverbial affirmation, and she spend the next year in bed, and the rest of her life in pain.
Frida didn’t wallow.
She painted.
First, she painted herself, dozens of times.
“I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she said.
Then she painted flowers.
“I paint flowers so they will not die,” she said.
Then she painted everything.
“The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to,” she said.
Frida painted her world, her reality, whichever way she saw it that day.
Heaven and hell.
Life and death.
She painted so much that people began to notice.
They called her paintings “surrealist” and “uncompromising.”
Frida didn’t care.
She called them all “coo-coo lunatics,” and she carried on painting.
Frida painted all her pain upon canvas, until finally, she painted a black angel.
Underneath it, she wrote, “I joyfully await the exit – and I hope never to return.”
And then, she left.