Sitting Semi-Nude with Blue Hairband 1914

Egon Schiele made this drawing of a semi-nude woman with watercolor and pencil back in 1914. It's like he’s seeing right through her, or maybe he’s seeing right through painting itself. There is a green jacket loosely wrapped around her body. Schiele is using these angular lines to try and trap her. The jacket becomes a cage, but she’s already escaped, and her gaze dares you to lock her in. The paint here is so thin, like a veil. It reminds me of how a painter friend of mine would work on one painting for years, always scraping it down, always beginning again. It makes me think of a conversation between painters, where the same images keep getting dragged up over time, always slightly different each time. Schiele is in that conversation too. He's not just drawing a person, he's thinking about how paintings work, what they do, and how they speak to each other across time.