Hockendes Paar 1910

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this drawing of two squatting figures with what looks like charcoal, or maybe crayon. It’s all about the directness of the mark, the smudging and the almost nervous energy of the line. You can feel the speed of his hand, the way he’s trying to capture a fleeting moment, the angle of a head or the curve of a back. I love the way the bodies are rendered with such simple strokes. There's a real economy of means, like he’s stripping away all the unnecessary details to get to the essence of the pose. It’s a bit like Matisse, but with a raw, almost brutal edge. See the way he’s used the side of the crayon to create these broad, shaded areas, and then scratched back into them with a sharper point? It's this constant push and pull between adding and subtracting that gives the drawing its dynamism. Kirchner's work reminds me that art is not about perfection, it's about process, about the messy, imperfect act of trying to make sense of the world around us.