Happy Birthday Frida 💜
I learned about Frida Kahlo first while scouring the internet fired by pain. I'd become entirely bound to my bed for months, under my sheets during this really dreadful period/flare up of chronic pain. I hadn't yet found the world of disability justice and the language for chronic pain. I had no idea what was happening to me, only that I wanted to draw and I couldn't make it to my table because the pain was too much. I spent hours looking at all the different photographs of Frida and the way she painted whatever she found, from wherever she was. Suddenly those afternoons I'd spent painting leaves on my thighs and dreams on my (boring blue-gray) hot compress made sense. I felt a little less lonely in my urgency to paint through the pain: to fill my body and the tools that supported it, with the colours I so desired. So I had to illustrate this photograph of Frida painting her orthopedic corset, it rang so many bells.
