Personal Narrative: Frida Kahlo, And Vincent Van Gogh

Bob Ross, Frida Kahlo, and Vincent Van Gogh. These are the names of legendary people who are most commonly known for one thing, their art. While part of me would like to place myself with these artists, I am by no means as talented as they are. The one thing we do have in common is a passion for self-expression. Art has played a gigantic role in my life. It all started with scribbles in a notebook when I was little. I would fill notebooks with my drawings. Like my art, I have changed and improved over the years. The way I was feeling wasn’t as obvious as it was before in my art, in other words it wasn’t as simple as a sad face or a smiley face. When I was sad I’d use darker colors, and when I was happy I’d use lighter colors, this is a basic

I felt a sense of childishness because I thought I was just painting a rainbow… how basic could I be? Well, I then decided to paint two hands reaching out for each other in the bottom-left and top-right corners of the painting. At this point, I was just painting hands because the instructor said it was one of the hardest things to paint, but subconsciously I think part of me was trying to express what I was feeling. From my personal experience, I’ve learned that an artist never really knows when to stop, you kind of just do it. I did not stop after painting the hands, I then splashed blue, pink, and purple paint all over the painting. I was done. After the workshop, we had a group discussion on what our paintings meant to us and why we painted them. I didn’t have an explanation at the time so I responded with a bogus answer of, “ I think rainbows are pretty,” which quite frankly is the dumbest response; however, part of me definitely knew why I painted what I did. I was initially apprehensive to the thought of me being gay because I’d liked boys before but I also thought girls were really pretty, and yet I still doubted my