Day Eleven!  Today was an extra challenging day regarding my art piece.  Not only was the artist someone that I love and admire, but my painting journey was especially arduous.  I’m not sure if it had to do with my own expectations or

if I was manifesting various difficulties in my mind.  It also could’ve been the fact that I’ve been out most of the day with friends and inspecting our new potential house.

Egon Schiele is an amazingly talented artist that I believe was way ahead of his time, both in the style in which he painted and illustrated and also in his subject matter.  I found a wonderful site that includes a great biography and his complete works.  I’ve included a small excerpt of his biography, but please click on the link below to read his full bio. www.egon-schiele.net

Egon Schiele (June 12, 1890 – October 31, 1918) (pronounced [ˈʃiːlə], approximately SHEE-luh) was an Austrian painter, a protégé of Gustav Klimt, and a major figurative painter of the early 20th century.

Schiele’s body of work is noted for the intensity and the large number of self-portraits he produced. The twisted body shapes that characterize Schiele’s paintings and drawings make the artist a notable exponent of Expressionism. The most important collection of Schiele’s work is housed in the Leopold Museum, Vienna.

Egon Schiele was born in Tulln on the Danube. His father, Adolf, worked for the Austrian State Railways as a station master; his mother, Marie, was from Krumau,

in Bohemia. As a child, he attended the school run by the Stift Klosterneuburg, where his arts teacher K.L. Strauch recognized and supported Schiele’s artistic talent.

Read full bio here.

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My painting process was waaaaay more stressful than I thought it would be.  First off, I was super excited when I saw his name because I wanted so badly to paint something in his style and as usual I thought, “I can do this…I’d paint something like this.”  Wrong.  Again I’m not sure if it had to do with my materials and paints I used.  I believe he mainly used oils and I used acrylics.  Acrylics dry much faster and the blending process is completely different.  I should’ve mixed the gel medium I bought yesterday and worked from that.  He also works with watercolors, which is what I should’ve done from the beginning.  It would’ve made a huge difference regarding my shading amongst other things.  The other reason I was super excited was that I thought of a silly picture that my friend had taken of me years ago during a girl’s night sleepover.  It seemed to be a perfect image to draw from because of Egon’s style of work.

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I basically took the pose from the photo, but changed the color scheme a bit and decided to paint myself with closed eyes instead of open.  I can’t express how many times I covered up this canvas with paint.  So many negative thoughts popped into my brain as I started this painting.

• I can’t paint.
• I’m not capturing the essence of this painter.
• I love Schiele and am dishonoring him with this piece of crap.
• Why can’t I paint something that seemingly seems simple?
• The colors are completely off.
• Why am I making this more complicated?
• Do I need to start off from scratch again.
• Fuck it, I’m going to just do another Abstract Expressionist today.

Again and again, I pushed those thoughts away…and of course they kept coming back.  I took another approach that my husband and

best friend pushed me towards, which was…embrace failure.  It’s a concept that I follow daily with most things and I’m an improviser, so I am pretty adept with being okay with not being okay.  I sat back down and told myself, “It’s okay if you hate this painting.  You are doing a painting a day and there will be ones that you’ll love and ones that you’ll hate.”  Once I let go of those expectations, my

painting started to transform and take on a life of it’s own.  I strived to capture Schiele’s spirit, but not his ghost and strived to just do a satisfactory painting in honor of him.  This

was a good example of, “It’s the thought that counts.”  I love you Egon Schiele and I hope that my painting would have made you smile (or you could’ve given me critical feedback) if you were alive.  Finally after all that incessant jibber-jabbering, I present to you my so-so piece.  xoxo, Linda