Brücke im Wald bei Königstein 1916

This drawing, 'Brücke im Wald bei Königstein,' by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is, for me, a bit like finding a secret map. With its scribbled charcoal lines and faint blue hints, you can see how it came into being, shifting and emerging through error, and intuition. I sympathize with Kirchner here, I think, what was it like to stand in that forest and let the lines flow out of you? The thin charcoal, with its scratchy surface, makes me want to reach out and smooth it, as if to ease the artist's hand. Look at the way one dark line suddenly thickens, as if bearing down on the page. Is that tension I feel, or excitement? Kirchner, like other expressionist painters, was in an ongoing conversation about how to capture emotion. Like a dance between chaos and control, this piece feels like a moment of embodied expression, it embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple readings.