Portrait of Martha Hoerler c. 1926

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this drawing of Martha Hoerler using crayon. The nervous energy of the lines, like they are vibrating on the page, give her this electric quality. He used color sparingly, just touches of red and yellow. I wonder what it was like for him to sit with her, feeling the weight of her gaze, trying to capture her likeness with these quivering marks. You can feel his own anxiety in the strokes. I keep thinking about the zig-zag line on the right. It feels like a thought, hovering and jagged. It reminds me of Cy Twombly's mark-making, and how generations of artists are in conversation, working through similar problems of how to communicate feeling, emotion, and thought in a visual language. Painting lets you do that.