Hello and welcome back to ArtHoles, the Art History Podcast with a real tenuous episode release schedule. I hope everyone is happy and healthy and ready to finish Frida's story.

We are here, we're at the end.

Thank you so much for your patience

with how long this finale took,

and for everyone who reached out

and made sure I was alive and didn't give up in the show. I really appreciate it.

It's been a crazy few months. I had to move, so I'm recording from a new closet.

It's been a rough back half of the pandemic and I'm looking forward to some normalcy again.

Which brings us to the finale itself which was supposed to be around two hours.

Then it got out of hand and I couldn't edit information out because the history gets so sketchy and we need every detail possible.

Otherwise there's a giant question mark where we can't have one.

So I'd go put an anecdote back in, reorganize, expand another section, resulting

in a two-parter that's, this is going to be a very long series. I did not mean for this to happen.

I admittedly got swept up into every aspect of this story. Frida's personality, Mexico, and what she was trying to accomplish with her paintings, putting herself in her work to a sometimes uncomfortable degree.

I don't know that I've ever put more of myself into something as this series, whether it's trying to articulate a feeling, tell

an embarrassing story, or talk about my lifelong obsession with Louis Gossett Jr.

I don't believe what I'm seeing. Well you've been all your lives.

And it a Orgy? I wanted to put so much into this that I'd be more okay with walking away at the end, without worrying if I missed an obscure academic journal

so we could have learned something we didn't need to learn, but I'm glad we did.

And it took a while for me to realize I was subconsciously trying to approach this series like I think

Frida would if she were telling someone else's story.

Frida had a difficult time finishing paintings for her entire career, getting to the place where she could make that last touch and say, I'm done, I said what I wanted to say.

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