Untitled. Srawberry Andreevna 2015

This drawing by Alevtyna Kakhidze consists of red and blue ballpoint pen writing on a white, oddly-shaped piece of paper. The handwritten script is mostly in Ukrainian and refers to the Maidan protests in Kyiv, but as a painter, I’m really drawn to its visual qualities. I think about how Alevtyna must have felt creating this work - what she was thinking when she made it. Maybe she was trying to make sense of it all, or maybe she was feeling scared. I wonder what it was like to draw the black shapes in the upper left-hand corner, like abstract, dark buildings. How the black ink bleeds a bit into the white paper, creating a slight fuzziness around the edges. This reminds me of Cy Twombly’s scribbled paintings, where writing becomes drawing, and drawing becomes feeling. Alevtyna’s work invites us to slow down, to consider the act of making itself. How do these marks, these colors, and these words come together to shape our understanding of what we are looking at?