Female image 1975

Hryhorii Havrylenko made this female image using pen, pencil, or something like that. Look at the face, how its forms are constructed with simple marks, lines, and cross-hatching. It's almost like the artist is feeling his way through the portrait, building the face up in layers. He’s mapping the geometry of the face. I wonder, when Havrylenko was drawing, was he thinking of the old masters, you know, like Dürer? Was he thinking about how to distill the essence of a person with just a few well-placed strokes? See how the density of the lines around the hair creates this kind of shadowy halo? It gives the figure a certain weight. Artists keep the conversation alive, passing ideas and techniques across generations. We embrace this process of ambiguity, knowing that a piece can mean so many things, none of them fixed.