Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits.
Egon Schiele's career was short, intense, and amazingly productive. Before succumbing to influenza in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight, he created over three hundred oil paintings and several thousand works on paper. The human figure provided Schiele with his most potent subject matter for both paintings and drawings.
Schiele used Auguste Rodin's continuous drawing technique to create his loose, fluid figurative sketches. It required constant eye contact with the life model, making Schiele's process of drawing an intimate experience between him and his subject.
Egon often drew from an elevated perspective and chose reclining poses for his models. This technique creates extreme foreshortening, making his figures seem distorted even when they are correctly proportioned. Foreshortening and distortion also work to make Schiele’s figures appear gaunt, twisted, and awkward.
Gustav Klimt was the primary influence on Schiele's development, serving as Schiele's friend and mentor. While Egon inherited Klimt's focus on erotic images of the female form, the emotionally intense, often unsettling Expressionist idiom Schiele eventually developed in some ways directly opposed his mentor's Art Nouveau–inspired style, with Klimt preferring a more brilliant palette and glimmering, patterned surfaces.
When I was looking into continuous lines works Egon Schiele is probably the most prominent artist to appear. His work was always there when I researched artist, once I seen his work I was immediately taken back. I found his elongated and somewhat eerie figures to be quite striking.
The hand studies he also produced had such a strong impact, the aesthetics of his art give the work such depth and beauty. I overall found his work to be moving, I would like to look into his work even further so that I can hopefully use his work to as reference for an drawing or continuous lines I plan to do. |