Self-Portrait at the Easel 1922

Lovis Corinth made this raw self-portrait with thick paint, a palette of browns, blacks, and creams, and decisive marks. The guy’s really going for it! It feels like he’s wrestling with himself to get a likeness down. I imagine Corinth wanted to capture not just what he looked like, but how it felt to be him, standing there, day after day, making paintings. And it must have been hard. You can see the physical struggle in the way he’s daubed and scrubbed at the canvas. The paint has a rough texture and the brushstrokes are all broken up like he was angry. There’s a long history of artists painting themselves at the easel, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh. It’s like they’re saying, “Hey, I’m a painter, this is what I do, this is who I am.” It reminds me that we're all in a conversation across time, trying to figure out how to make sense of the world through paint.