Portrait of a Woman with Blue and Green Scarf 1914

Egon Schiele made this portrait of a woman with a blue and green scarf with watercolour and pencil, at an unknown date. The colours are like feelings here, raw and a little uneasy, don't you think? The surface is alive, with all the pencil lines and washes of colour. It's clear Schiele wasn't trying to hide his process. You can almost feel him figuring things out as he went, adding layer upon layer to build up the colours. Look at the way the blue of the woman's jacket is built up with tiny hatching marks. The texture this creates is soft, almost like velvet. The tension and fragility of the mark-making is echoed in the subject’s vulnerable hands and face. Schiele was doing his own thing and he was influenced by artists like Gustav Klimt, but he took it somewhere else, somewhere that was very much his own. Art’s not about answers, is it? It’s about keeping the conversation going.