Here is an example of a fertility related article from www.happynews.com.

Reported in this article is that the painting "Roots" by Frida Kahlo set the record as the highest price for the sale of a piece of Latin American art. It also set a high for the artist as well. Here is part of the background behind the painting.

The 1943 oil-on-metal shows the artist reclining in a bright orange dress with leafy roots growing out of her body into the ground _ a symbol of being nourished by the earth. It had never before appeared on the public market, Sotheby's said.


It was completed after Kahlo remarried Diego Rivera, the renowned Mexican muralist. The couple was unable to have children, and ''Roots'' expresses Kahlo's desire for fertility and to be a part of the life cycle.

This description was found on www.thecityreview.com.

The catalogue provides the following commentary by Hayden Herrera:

"Roots, 1943, is one of Frida Kahlo's least anguished and most beautiful self-portaits. Like its counterpart, My Nurse and I, 1937, it is a passionate expression of Kahlo's deep identification with nature. In the earlier painting Frida is an infant suckling at her Mexican Indian wet nurses's plant-like breast. Fr9m this earth mother, she imbibes not only her Indian heritage, but also the essence of her native land. In Roots, on the other hand, it is Frida who nourishes that land by giving birth to a vine. Curiously, given the painting's title, the vine has no visible roots. It must, therefore, be rooted in Frida, but Frida, floating just above a barren landscape and painted in a much large scale, is rootless, as in a dream. The year she painted Roots, Kahlo was engrossed in a project that would bind her to her husband, Diego Rivera, and that would connect both spouses to the Mexican earth. In 1942, on a piece of land bought with Kahlo's money in a section of Mexico City called the Pedregal (meaning stony ground), the Riveras began to build a temple for Rivera's collection of pre-Columbian idols....Kahlo adored the Pedregal's rough, uningratiating expanse of grey. pitted rocks, and it is this landscape that appears in Roots....The stems of the vine in Roots....have no thorns. Instead this vine has thirteen cut off stems. These leafless stems might stand for Kahlo's losses - her unborn children, her wounded body, her lost loves...."

I love reading art reviews, although I don't set too much stock in them. I had read a memoir by Amy Tan recently where she discusses picking up a ClifsNotes version of one of her books at a book store. She was dumbfounded by what others had read into her writing, sometimes way off of the mark. Is this painting really reflecting her infertility, or her miscarriages? Regardless, we can take inspiration from this woman who used her art to express her pain to the world. At the very least, this painting is so stunning to look at.