The Nephew 1929

Helene Schjerfbeck made this drawing of her nephew using charcoal. The way she works, it's all about the process, you know? It's like she's thinking through the charcoal, letting the marks lead her. If you look closely, you can see how the charcoal sits on the paper, sometimes soft and smudgy, sometimes dark and defined. It's all about the texture, the physicality of the medium. See the charcoal strokes around his eye. It's a little like she's using the charcoal to feel her way into his gaze, not to just copy what she sees, but to figure out what's going on behind it. Schjerfbeck reminds me a little of Paula Modersohn-Becker, another artist who was thinking about the human figure in a new way. But where Modersohn-Becker goes for a kind of earthy solidity, Schjerfbeck's more about this fragile, searching quality. It’s never really pinned down, always open to interpretation.