The Nurse 1917

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted “The Nurse” with oil on canvas at an unknown date. The painting’s a trip, right? It's got this raw, almost feverish energy. I’m really drawn to the way Kirchner uses colour. It’s not about what things actually look like, but more about how they *feel*. Take the nurse’s face for example, it’s green, but it doesn't matter because it’s expressive. The strokes are thick and loaded. Everything feels urgent, like he’s trying to capture a fleeting moment, or maybe a feeling that’s hard to put into words. The background is like a hallucination, all clashing colors and jagged shapes. For me, the way the blue paint scumbles into the yellow in the top left corner is particularly arresting, as if the figure is being swallowed up by the setting. Kirchner, like Edvard Munch, has the gift of projecting interiority onto a canvas. The work sits in a lineage with other expressionistic and symbolist painters whose mission it was to reveal the artist’s inner torment. It’s a visual scream.