Illustration for the collection of short stories by Yevhen Gutsal "In the stork village" 1969

Hryhorii Havrylenko made this illustration for a collection of short stories using ink. The marks are so repetitive, but precise. I can imagine him, like, totally focused, hatching lines over and over. The image is of a rooster but the lines feel like a landscape, too. Did he start with the chicken or the background? It's hard to tell, maybe one emerged from the other. Each mark so confident! You know, it makes me think of Agnes Martin’s grids but with a barnyard twist. I guess both artists were into something meditative and methodical. There is something very pleasing about that. I love how one person's ideas influence another, even across different generations. It's like we are all adding to some big shared painting in the sky. And what someone does, it kind of sends a message to someone else to do something else.