Portrait of a Child 1916

Here is a drawing of a child done by Egon Schiele, we don’t know exactly when. Look at the way the ink line wanders and thickens, almost shivering along the paper. There’s a kind of fragile openness here, isn’t there? I wonder what Schiele was thinking, what he felt as he made the drawing. It is almost as if he is charting the geography of childhood, mapping out the shapes, colors, and contours, allowing feeling to guide his hand. The orange and yellow clash and sing out at the same time against the brown paper. The orange feels like the kid’s energy, the yellow more tentative, like an idea. And the brown paper? That’s the ground zero. The place from which all this emerges. Looking at this portrait makes me realize how lucky we are to be artists, how lucky we are to get to participate in this ongoing conversation.