ImagineACircle

Of all my favourite artists, Egon Schiele is the one I find hardest to explain. His art is rarely conventionally beautiful. He tells few stories and fights no political battles. I struggle to point out any single work as a ‘masterpiece’. His scope is small, narrowed down to the souls he could see tossing in his bed and reflected in his mirror, and intensely personal. And yet I cannot escape him. His art has a style that is all his own, a view of the world that feels painfully, and sometimes gleefully, honest.

Egon Schiele did not have much in the way of range when it came to subject matter. He painted and drew himself, his friends, dilapidated houses and, most commonly of all, naked bodies. Usually a combination of the above. He was a wonderful portraitist, but he gifted few of his subjects with the same depth of feeling…