Surface

If you asked me what stays with me most from this trip to Vienna, it would be the surprising surfaces in Schiele's paintings. Nothing I saw in books prepared me for this.
Standing infront of one of his canvasses, it's like having a conversation with the artist, direct and first hand, no interpreter, just you and him.
The mulitude of colours, the scrapings, the poking into the spaces between objects, the playing with negative and positive shapes, the pencilled sgraffito, his constant search for form, and an overriding sadness, a whistfulness, in his landscapes, trees, buildings and his figures.
Klimt almost looks Disneyfied next to Schiele, Klimt was a crowd pleaser, but Schiele - a man before his time and precocious way beyond his years.
The image - (sorry from my phone but it coped better with the light at the Leopold) is a detail of the belly of the last image he made of his wife, when he was at the tender of 28! To have established one's own way of seeing the world so soon... amazing.
He died of Spanish flu shortly after this, taken at such a young age - makes one wonder what he might have gone on to do - or maybe this was him at the height of his perceptions... we'll never know.
I'm so glad to have got to see his work.
It will stay with me a long time.