Seated Young Girl 1910

Egon Schiele made this seated young girl drawing sometime around 1910, and it looks like it's made with some combination of gouache and crayon. I love how the brown of the paper peeks through, becoming part of the picture itself, like the ground that everything else floats on. I'm really drawn to the way the colours and textures mix here, how the washes of purple and red in the stockings create a kind of shimmering effect. It’s like you can feel the material, the slight give and stretch of the fabric. There’s also that bold, almost clumsy, outline of white around the figure. It makes her seem both present and strangely disconnected, like a memory. You know who this reminds me of? Marlene Dumas. She had that same kind of psychological intensity, that ability to capture something raw and vulnerable in her portraits, but also someone like Alice Neel. They both remind me that art is not about perfect representation, but about feeling, about the messy, beautiful struggle to connect with the world.