An Encounter with Frida Kahlo's Sun and Life

Sun and Life by Frida Kahlo, 1947

I saw Sun and Life at the Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden in 2015. I’d seen it before in books and online, but it never struck me.

Seeing it in person hit me like a ton of bricks. For a brief moment, when I looked into the weeping third eye of the sun, the veil was lifted. 

All of this was before I had my own experience with miscarriages. I was well aware of infertility as a major theme of Kahlo's work. She was the only woman I knew of who confronted the topic so openly. It wasn’t something the women in my life discussed. This painting was waiting for me.

The painting itself is a tangle of life and death. Visceral yet spiritual. A radiating sun that also weeps. A life-giver with the distinct awareness of life’s fragility. The sun bears witness to the bittersweetness of life. Creation and sorrow are not separate. To see clearly is to know what can be lost.

Sun and Life was painted a few years before Kahlo’s death. In her lifetime, she created an iconic body of work, but I believe this is her masterpiece. It does what great art is meant to do: connect us to something greater than ourselves. It’s both deeply personal and transcendent. Sun and Life contains the raw reality of CREATION: life and death in the same breath.