Frida Kahlo - Portrait Drawing

I think Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is known to most people. She is one of the art world luminaries.

While often lumped in with the Surrealists, she herself disliked this inclusion, because as she put it, her artworks were about her reality, an often very painful one, that plagued her throughout her life because of a traffic accident she suffered in her teens that permanently damaged her spine.

Her paintings therefore were not intellectual daydreams, but rather her way of processing her life.

I had the good fortune of seeing an exhibition of her artworks in Berlin some years ago. Unfortunately the exhibition was not that large, so by the end of it, I was still wanting to see more. But I gathering, insuring and shipping famous artworks around the world is a challenge at the best of times.

It is my plan to portrait a number of the artists that interest me. This is an ongoing project that I return to when the mood strikes me. I wonder if I will ever see them all together in one place at sometime in the future. This may be difficult as many of them have been sold to collectors around the globe.

Typically I paint artist portraits, working from their self portraits, using them as studies. However with this drawing I was working from a black and white photo, so this monotone drawing suited it well.

There are many more artists for me yet to do.

Here are some images of the drawing development. You can see how I started out with approximations and then step by step refined the image. You have to be OK with things not looking right in the beginning and be prepared to observe and modify the image as you progress.

But this is lost on many people today who expect instant results.

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