Frida Kahlo is probably the reason I am in Mexico City right now.

I first heard about her in 1991. She was mentioned in an interview that Madonna gave to a magazine in her Los Angeles home.

The article described a painting that was hanging in one room, of a Mexican painter I had never heard of.

In the interview, Madonna explained what the painting, called ‘My birth‘, meant to her.

At the time, 16 years old and at the peak of my Madonna fever, I asked my mother whether she knew the artist. A few weeks later, she brought me a biography of Frida Kahlo.

I read the big book in one go, and was touched by the paintings. They are not beautiful, for the most part, but weird, sometimes cruel images of what seemed a very tortured body, and soul. But they spoke to me.

I still remember finishing the book, on a rainy afternoon, sitting in my bed and crying, as Frida Kahlo died.

Since then I have read several other books, visited every museum that owns one of there pairings that I could somehow get to, and even went to London (twice) in 2005 when the Tate Modern honored her with a major exhibition.

My favorite painting is the Broken Column, that I had framed and on display in my former Brussles home.

To me, it depicts vulnerability, but also exudes incredible human strength and posture.

So it was clear that I would visit Coyoacán, the little town close to the capital where Frida was born, lived and died.

We all went to the Casa Azul, the ‘blue house’, built by her father,  a German immigrant and photographer, Guillermo Kahlo.

I had expected a somewhat small building, but was surprised to see a rather big complex with several houses and generous courts and backyards.

It is a beautiful place, filled with many on Frida’s paintings, dresses, books, her atelier that remains exactly as she left it, her Mexican-style kitchen, the art and Mexican objects she collected.

You can see her beautiful dresses, and the corsets she had to wear all her life due to her horrific accident at the age of 18.

You can see the wheelchair that still stands in front of her easel, with an unfinished painting.

You can see her bed, complete with the mirror on top that she used when se painted herself in one of these endless periods when she had to be immobilized in bed.

There’s also a lot to learn about her tumultuous marriage(s) to  Diego Rivera, who at the time was seen as one of the greatest Mexican artists, but whose fame by now is overshadowed by his wife.

Why do you like one painting, while the other leaves you cold? It’s hard, or impossible, to analyse.

For me, her paintings are a testament to an unbreakable hunger and lust for life, whatever the obstacles, illnesses, corsets, wheelchairs and accidents that life put her through.

That woman had something burning inside her that had to get out, and even when she was immobilized through the corsets and operations, she expressed that through her art.

Even when seriously ill and beaten by the many operations, she did not stop, she went out and fought for her cause, her political convictions, her ideas.

Probably knowing it would only shorten the life she had left.

I am fascinated by that will to live, and to find something positive and worth living for, as dire as the situation might seem.

As she has put it in one of her last paintings, a still life of water melons, probably sensing her approaching death.

Viva la vida.