Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress // Frida Kahlo

Self-portrait wearing a velvet dress
Frida Kahlo, 1926 (via Google Arts & Culture)
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Frida Kahlo, Thinking About Death, 1943 (via kahlo.org)

“In the painting she stares out unflinchingly against a backdrop of luxuriant foliage. In the centre of her forehead, just above the two dark bushy eyebrows, is a perfectly circular round hole, within which is a rural landscape dominated by a skull and crossbones.

The face is neither frightened nor filled with despair; it is calm. She seems to say that if death and suffering can be accepted as a natural part of life then fulfilment is possible. It is one of her many self-portraits that relentlessly lay bare her pre-occupations with death and her own physical fragility.

It demonstrates her fearlessness in confronting what lies at the centre of existence: death.

By putting death in the place of the third eye, the chakra, she makes it the source of all wisdom.”