Frida Kahlo is a respected and intriguing artist of Mexico. She is known as the wife of Diego Rivera and the maker of haunting paintings of surrealism and magical realism. She was often the subject of her work. This painting is in the collection of the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio.

Frida Kahlo experienced much pain in her life. She was in physical pain from a bus accident when she was 18 years old that left her spine, ribs, pelvis, right leg and abdomen severely injured. She was in emotional pain from her stormy marriage/divorce/remarriage to Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist. These seem etched across her face in her many works of art.

In Tree of Hope, Remain Strong Kahlo pictures herself as a suffering patient and the determined hero of her own tragedy. This work was inspired by an operation on her back. Also pictured is the steel corset she was to wear for eight months after the surgery. That the corset is pictured in pink seems a point of calculated cynicism. Neither the surgery nor the corset was successful.

Kahlo is quoted as saying, “I enjoy being contradictory.” Her treatment of the sky here with sunlight over suffering and darkness over her pledge in a fissured landscape seems contradictory and foreboding. In this work Kahlo may have captured the “I am alone and I am never alone” contradiction of faith in God. She seems to have captured in her brash, unsmiling style those times when our choice to be strong can be a choice to more completely open ourselves to God and stand unflinchingly in that connection. Have you known such a time? Can you imagine the prayer you would add to the flag she holds?

Frida Kahlo died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1954. She remains an esteemed and quietly outrageous icon of the world of art. 

In gratitude, faith and hope,

Sandy Prouty
Minister of Children and Families
Montview Church