Kirchner und Dodo im Café 1906

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner drew Kirchner and Dodo in the Café using pastels, and you can really feel the dry stickiness of the medium. I can imagine him there in the café, quickly scribbling with the pastel to capture the scene. Look how the yellow pastel outlines the figures, giving them this kind of glowing, electric vibe against the greens and reds in the background. I get a sense of how he's translating what he sees, not in a photorealistic way, but in a way that gets at the feeling of the moment, like a snapshot of a memory. That nervous energy and tension that comes through in so much of Kirchner's work, maybe he wasn't feeling so relaxed that day at the café. What do you think? I bet other expressionist painters like Munch and Heckel, with their explorations of subjective experience, were on his mind. It’s so cool how painting can be this ongoing conversation, echoing and answering one another across time.