Egon Shciele

Egon Shciele was an Asutrian painter in the early 20th century. He mostly did figures, much of which are self portraits. I do a lot of figure drawings and I really like his interpretation of the human body. I think a really natural tendency that you have to unlearn when you first start drawing figures is to try and make them as uniform to what you know to be a human body as you can and to try and draw what you think you see rather than what you actually see. With Schiele's work he doesn't smooth over the imperfections of the models but rather accentuates them and as a result the figures really intensify. As a side note I also really like the fact that in many of his pantings the figures look dead inside, or like dolls (haven't quite intellectualized why I like that part of his pantings yet). Another noteworthy aspect of his pieces is the sexuality he depicts in them. Considering he only lived from 1890 to 1918, that was some pretty risqué stuff to paint about.