Landscape in Lower Austria 1907

Egon Schiele made this small landscape in Lower Austria, with oil on canvas, sometime before 1918. Schiele uses these really direct strokes, almost like he's knitting the fields together, stitch by stitch. The paint isn't shy; you can feel the drag of the brush, the way the bristles loaded with color have a conversation with the canvas. Look at how he builds those fields—horizontal stripes, greens and yellows, pulled across the surface, one after the other. There's a certain immediacy to it, a sense of urgency, like he's trying to catch something fleeting. It reminds me of some of Gustav Klimt's landscapes, but rougher. Schiele wasn't trying to make it perfect; he's showing us the raw energy of seeing, the act of painting itself. It is more about gesture than a perfect copy of a place.