Sailboats at Fehmarn 1914

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made "Sailboats at Fehmarn" with charcoal, maybe, or some kind of dry pigment, we don’t know exactly when. I love the sheer speed of it. It's as if Kirchner was trying to catch a feeling, a fleeting moment, with all those sketchy, urgent lines. You can almost see him squinting at the light, charcoal stick in hand, trying to get it all down before the wind shifted, or the boat sailed away. The way he layers the lines creates this feeling of movement, like the sails are billowing and the water's choppy. You can sense the energy of the scene, the push and pull of nature. It looks like it was made in one sitting, without the artist stopping to take a breath. What bravery, what confidence! Kirchner was part of a group called Die Brücke, and they were all about expressing raw emotion through art, and you feel that here, the immediacy, the directness. It reminds me to loosen up, take a risk, and trust my gut.