Paint What You Know

I am certain of a few things. One, that Frida Kahlo, Mexico’s acclaimed artist, was born to suffer great emotional and physical anguish in order to find release, strength, and hope through painting, and painting what she knew best, herself. Some 66 years later she has inspired a vast and diverse population of women who like her, are seeking healing and identity through their creativity.

She died at the young age of 54, from complications resulting from childhood polio and an accident that resulted in multiple spinal surgeries, the loss of her leg, and debilitating recoveries. Yet through a troubling marriage, divorce, and remarriage to the famous muralist and philanderer Diego Rivera, she never stopped painting. Documenting her life and her pain, she has delivered herself as an abiding possibility of diagnosis and healing for others, including myself.

My commitment to reclaim art and writing began at 47, in the midst of a failing marriage. I had taken time away from our home in Maryland to assess our progress in Key West. Hoping this distance would make his heart grow fonder, the space between us escalated his love for another. Then she moved into our house. Heartbroken and humiliated, I couldn’t return.

Two stress-filled years travelling back and forth for court hearings resulted in a settlement and alimony that would allow me the freedom to explore art and writing. I’d abandoned it once for marriage and children. I wasn’t going to do it ever again.. This is where I believe Frida may have taken up residence in my mind and heart.

So I started sculpting and painting. collaging and writing. Two vodka tonics and a joint as daily pain killers, I drowned my sorrows. Sunning, bar hopping, dancing, and writing fictional versions of a woman driven to suicide and murder because of a cheating husband filled my days. No doubt I was hungry for closure..

Diving into multiple new age therapies for clarity didn’t help. Having escaped a toxic affair, I rented a commercial space on Duval Street, Key West’s main street. Alone for the first time, I created a much needed sanctuary. One day in great despair I accidentally discovered a book on Goddess psychology, and over many months I tracked major events and challenges that mirrored the archetypes of the six Greek Goddesses. In living the unexplored territories of missing energies, I heavily smoked, drank, and used marijuana. The gallery majestically grew into a visual collage of one woman’s possessions. From floor to wall to vaulted ceilings furnishings, art, fabrics, and accessories were used to tell my tale. I opened it as a performance art gallery where the six Greek Goddesses, each of whom had inspired me to reclaim my power, independence and love, were channelled in private performances as a visual, musical and spiritual collage. It was the ultimate surrender of life and loss. Free at last, I became an overnight sensation. Until I wasn’t.

Inconveniently diagnosed with throat cancer, I had to return to Maryland for eight weeks of radiation, a treatment that left me speechless, unable to swallow, and a skeletal version of myself. Barely functioning I returned to Key West, tearfully ripped away months of work, closed the gallery, sold all but a few basic possessions at auction, rented an apartment, wrote a memoir and got my house in order to die. Little did I know that month by month I was getting closer to a total laryngectomy. Radiation had caused so much damage there was nothing left to save.

I made a deal with the Great Mother that if I survived the removal of my voice box, it would be by her design only. Because I couldn’t imagine such silence.

As Frida left the world at 54, at 54 I was reborn. Not consciously or even willingly. In the seven years since my divorce I had come full circle from decades of multiple dependencies resulting in a tragic medical crisis, to a miraculous healing and financial freedom. Cancer free, at the invitation of a friend who had entered recovery while I was up north, I attended my first AA meeting, ironically on the same island that kept me drunk for five years. I was in shock. But I was sober.

A werk or so later, at an early morning meeting, I mustered the courage to share with my electronic voice box. The room emptied of all noise and all eyes were upon me. I slowly said my name and that I wasn’t sure if I was an alcoholic, but I knew that I couldn't drink anymore. The air changed in that moment of release. Colors brightened, and the sky shivered a sigh. I had spoken actual sentences again. Out loud, in front of 60 people.

I must have told the group that I was an artist, because the following morning a tan, chain-smoking woman named Eileen introduced herself. She asked me if I knew about the artist Frida Kahlo, and I nodded no, that I didn’t. She peered into my eyes, saying that I reminded her of her. Then she handed me a Barnes and Noble bag, with a book inside titled “ A Brush of Anguish.” “Enjoy,“ she smiled, and off she went. It was a biography of Frida Kahlo.

I read the entire day and well into the night, with mounting curiousity about the how and why of so many strange coincidences. I didn’t just identify with Frida’s childhood and her plight through disability, heartbreak, and chronic pain, every page seemed a mirror reflecting another aspect of myself. Exhausted from it all, I slept well into the next day.

I met with Eileen later in the week for coffee, and we unveiled stunning similarities in our personal stories, the most telling of which included the coincidence of her divorce and rheumatoid arthritis that coincided with my divorce, cancer and the loss of my voice. Every gathering resulted in outpourings of relatedness, with Frida dumping one revelation after another into our laps to digest. Frida had found her way to Eileen from another artist in a stormy period of reinvention as well. Now she was convinced that Frida was a shape-shifter, and was alive in me to affirm her notions of divine intervention.

Where I was a spiritual seeker, I was no match for Eileen’s religious fervor and personal faith, but I listened with an open mind. After exhilaratingly conversations I agreed that coincidence surely had to be more than random facts in collision.

It was true. I was not just an artist, like Frida. I had been a consummate performer and decorator who knew few boundaries. From currently dressing myself in long flowing skirts and clunky large silver jewelry, to formerly keeping an impeccable home, art, style and writing had always been at the center of everything I touched.

I had a Jack Russell terrier, my constant companion, who resembled Frida’s Mexican dogs. I also adored my father, and had a stoic suffocating mother. After leaving Maryland and establishing myself in Key West I let my hair grow long and wild, swearing off beauty parlors, bleach and manicures. I traded in designer clothes for loose linen, sandals and sand, hats adorned with flowers and roister feathers - and any other fallen piece of Key West’s flora and fauna I found to add to it. I wrapped every square inch of my bicycle in twine to avert the stealth of island thieves. Having miraculously escaped an unsatisfying corporate lifestyle in Maryland, my creativity blossomed with boozy indulgence in ways I knew Frida understood.

I was also an aspiring portrait painter. Faces had predominated my curiosity since childhood. I’d also kept a journal since my teens and I was politically liberal and had been overly sensitive to the underdog.

After my divorce I had explored bisexual urges and had brief affairs with women. I also realized in recovery that I drank and smoked and used marijuana for years to treat undiagnosed alcoholism.

If our parallel personalities weren’t enough to convince me, a few weeks later I met a man who starkly resembled Diego. Tall and imposing, David was a more physically fit version of him, but his dark complexioned face, easy manner and soulful eyes had Eileen convinced Diego had incarnated him and brought him to me in my time of loneliness and recreation. It was all too much to absorb but too fascinating not to entertain.

Alglow in being tethered by Frida, the three of us were constant company. Until one day without notice or explanation Eileen’s attention waned and she became increasingly less available. David and I had become a 24/7 couple and it was as if she knew her part had been played. Now it was out of her hands.

In her certainty, she was convinced that where Frida’s life had ended in the throes of addiction, she was now seeking her redemption through me. She would tell me in times of puzzled inquiry about the mystery of gods and parallel universes, “Are we not after all merely instruments of an imagination greater than our own?” Why couldn't you be the manifested spirit of Frida? I had no substantial argument to attest otherwise. So I trusted that Eileen believed. That was enough as I began to redirect my creativity through Frida’s moniker of guts and glory.

In the balancing act that followed, with David by my side and Eileen a disappearing conundrum, I furiously dug into the details of Frida’s life and art. With the absorption of each biography, journal, portrait and photograph the distance between us grew shorter and the differences grew smaller. Where she had been an initial avenue of learning about one artist facing great burdens of heart and soul, she had become a stunning and familiar sober shadow of my own sufferings. And in their remembrance, with vocal expression mechanically dull, the urge to create returned. But what now?

Frida began to paint following a bus accident where she had been pelvically impaled by a handrail. Bedridden for months at a time, she would retrace and document her life, the accident, and her anguish. Mine began in childhood during emotional and physical abuse, was stalled by the demands of marriage and family, and reawakened after my laryngectomy. I too began to draw, paint, write and express my feelings through art.

Attending daily meetings with Frida as my heroine, I wrote and made art in journals as a way to focus and to soften my objections against a colorful group of mentally altered recovering people like myself, who I love today for their courage and honesty. I was diagnosed with lung cancer at 7 years sober, and am currently in remission 15 years later. These years have been hard ones, but beautifully fulfilling because Frida showed me I could create a life governed by my own rules, walled off from chaos through love and beauty.

In 22 years of sobriety Frida’s spirit has been with me. Where she could not gain leverage against her addictions, I have. Because of her influence I have identified in my sobriety the prevailing systemic imbalance of power and authority in relationships, and have remained single to pursue art and activism fulltime.

I have used my later years to create and distribute a documentary helping children to never start smoking. I became a columnist for my local paper and wrote on the topics of cancer, addiction and spirituality. Even though I speak electronically, I have somewhat perfected its nuances and at 76, I am share my story on topics of addiction, spurituality and recovery.

I recently had a 30 year retrospective at our Community College, and was able to show many paintings representing 12 step recovery programs, and a series of Frida’s faces painted through my interpretive eye. Frida has inspired in me a voice that helps others

Because of Frida I began to paint again, and because of all we’ve suffered, conquered and survived, I know that painting what I know is enough.

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