Special Guest Blogger: Frida Kahlo

They called me Frida Kahlo as my real name, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, took too long to say but despite suffering from polio as a child and a nasty accident on a bus which collided with a trolley car and broke my spinal column, collar bone, ribs, pelvis, and leg which took over 30 operation to fix, i became Mexico's most famous artist.
I specialised in self portraits mostly because finding myself in constant traction with corsets and broken legs and plaster casts, it was pretty much the only thing I could do was to lie there and paint although people did say my art contained a lot of pain and suffering but i would say ever been in a bus when it flips over and crushes most the bones in your body? Comprende?
I always think you should paint what you know and in my case, that was a lot of X-rays and internal organs and I used a special easel with mirrors so I could see myself and do self-portraits.
I also put  a lot of my culture and political ideas on canvas, I was a proud Communist and painted Karl Marx, Mao, Stalin, Engels and Leon Trotsky who i hobnobbed with when he was in Mexico, he lived me with for several years  and i even got arrested on suspicion for his murder.
Leon was a sweetie but not so much my husband, the muralist Diego Rivera who was an abusive bastardo, anger management issues you may say and while i was barely a cripple and he was over six feet tall and three hundred pounds, it was not a good time let me tell you.
I had an exhibition exhibition in Paris in 1938 and The Louvre bought a picture and I met fellow artists such as Picasso, Kandinksy and Duchamp, and they made me feel a part of their Surrealist group which really helped me become something in the art world although i thought their work was cuckoo but i played along because i was now popular.
I had exhibition in Mexico but i was in such bad shape my doctors told me not to attend but i wasn't going to miss that so i arrived in an ambulance, and they carried me in on a stretcher. I had my giant four-poster bed delivered to the gallery, and they put me right in the middle of the action.
Everyone said how brave i was but lots of painkillers and even more tequila helped  ease the pain of my broken body but the pain stopped when i hit 47. Some say i died from one of my many ailments, some say it was suicide from a drink and drugs overdose but as there was no autopsy, nobody knows for certain although the death certificate said: Pulmonary Embolism' so let's go with that.