Dodo Seated 1910

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this drawing, Dodo Seated, with pencil. Look at the way the line nervously scratches across the page, not sure about where it’s going. Some lines are darker and more assertive than others. You can see the ghost of the artist’s hand moving over and over, adjusting, trying to find a form in all the searching. I imagine he was trying to grasp something in his mind. You know, like when you're looking at someone and wanting to see them, but you can’t quite find what you're looking for? Like, who is that person? It reminds me of my own process, trying to capture something elusive, a feeling, an idea, in a web of lines. There’s an erasure on the left, like maybe there was a pet there, a dog or a cat, now rubbed out but still present. When one artist looks at another’s work, we see a conversation happening across time, a shared language of marks and gestures. It’s never fixed or certain, but always changing, always alive.