Female Image 1960

Hryhorii Havrylenko made "Female Image" with oil paint, and you can see how the surface has come into being, shifting and emerging through touch and intuition. I can imagine what it might have been like to create this figure. Those red eyes stare straight ahead. There's yellow and pink on the face. Everything is made of strokes of color, so the form feels provisional, on its way somewhere. It's a head with a headdress, but also just paint. What was Havrylenko thinking when he put down those confident marks? How did he choose those colors? It feels like a conversation happening right on the canvas. Painters are in an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity, so this painting feels linked to the history of figuration as well as abstraction, and painting as a form of embodied expression which embraces ambiguity. The painting welcomes multiple interpretations, none more definitive than another.