Dear Frida Kahlo (wherever you are):

Today is Thursday,23 March 23, 2023, or four days after I was in Sao Paulo attending and hypnotized by a fascinating exhibition in your honor.

You are/were a great Mexican artist; your lovers included the Russian revolutionary Trotsky and your husband-mentor, the great Mexican painter-muralist Diego Rivera, among others.

You had a rough childhood, including contracting polio at 6 years of age and fracturing your spine and pelvis as a youth when your bus collided with a streetcar.

Your survival and use of art and design (including your exotic Mexican attire) is an example to any of us who complain about life´s problems but don’t do anything about them.

Unfortunately for this observer the fascinating exhibition in Sao Paulo—which should eventually come to Rio de Janeiro (July?)– centered on your life, loves and epoch rather than displaying your art works.

Yet this observer feels he has seen everything you might have produced on the canvas.

But just to check I am googling images connected with your name as I write this.

In the tradition of such great artists from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, Gauguin and among others, one notes that the majority of your works are self-portraits.

These self-portraits include yourself in innumerous attires you created from Mexican folklore.

But how strange that although there is a painting of you and Diego, the subject you chose repeatedly was yourself, or self-portraits.

“Know thyself,” say the great philosophers.

And there you are in so many poses—including with your bare breasts out—that you, Frida, seem like many different persons.

One also notes Frida with her monkey, Frida in her bed dreaming what seems a nightmare and Frida seated at a table with skeletons.

One doesn´t have to read Freud, Jung or others, these self-portraits talk more about the complexity of one person, one woman, than thousands of words.

I came away from the exhibition in Sao Paulo with a strange feeling of mysticism, as if I had visited another world, or planet ruled by the mind, spirit and emotions rather than daily occurrences which are here today and gone tomorrow.

And perhaps this is why Frida you are considered a great artist who will live on!