Austrian Painter, Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

"At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants." E. Schiele

I had the pleasure of closely viewing many of Schiele's drawings and sketches at the Neue Galerie in New York a few years ago. His figurative works are easily defined by the detailed bone structure he managed to capture...the bones, muscle and joints beneath the skin. Notable was the absolute delicacy of each often heavy, line...a talent to express strength, grace and sinew all within the same line...don't you think?

Having studied and worked alongside fellow Modernism heavy weights such as Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoscha, many of his portraits, erotic in nature, have a tense beauty that seems to come from within. Schiele favored geometric shapes and his portraits have a twisting, bending, jerky, angled presence about them. Favoring a muddier palette, his work was often punctuated with jolts of intense color. His paintings and sketches are both visually

stunning and unnerving at the same time.