2/16/2025, Sketch Batch

Outside of the first nude and my self portrait, my sketches this week were primarily focused on another painting idea.

Egon Schiele has a painting titled "Youth Kneeling Before the God Father". It's an expressionist piece that has a young man kneeling before a holy figure that is wearing golden yellow robes on a black background. I think the piece is extremely powerful and it got me thinking, what about the idea of God as a woman?

I want the layout that Schiele had: a large figure with a man kneeling in front. But of course, the hardest part is trying to figure out how to display the woman as a Godly figure.

Should she be covered completely? Part of me thinks yes; I should use abstract feminine shapes to define her, similar to how Schiele painted his "God Father". Circles, flowing lines, ovals, etc. Most of our religious figures are completely covered and I think this would be a safe route.

The other part of me thinks that she should have some form of nudity. A naked female figure would not allow the viewer to manipulate this Godly form into being a male. A favorite feminine trait of the women from the Vienna Secessionists (Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt's time period) was wide hips & pubic hair.

Perhaps I should do both, somehow. Create a clothed female form but have some aspect of it be decidedly, unarguably, feminine.

I'll keep sketching and drawing these ideas out as they come to me, but this may be one of those instances where I need to just slap some paint on a canvas and go from there, without any planning.

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