Four Trees 1917

Egon Schiele painted these "Four Trees" at some point in his short life using oils, but it looks like watercolor somehow. The colors in this landscape are, I don’t know… raw? The red sun almost looks like a wound, right? And the trees, they’re not just standing there. Schiele’s making them reach and twist. There’s this gnawing energy in how he paints each leaf, each branch, like they’re desperate for something. Look at the tree second from the left, see how he lets the branches be bare? It’s like he's scraping away at beauty to find something more real underneath. Someone like Munch comes to mind when I see this. They both had a way of making the natural world mirror the stuff that’s hard to look at inside ourselves. It’s not just a landscape; it’s a state of mind.