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

This illustration by Hryhorii Havrylenko, for Yevhen Gutsal's "In the Stork Village," is made entirely of hatching, creating an image of storks mid-flight over what looks like trees or buildings. I can imagine Havrylenko thinking about all those lines. How to make them just right so we feel like we're looking into a cloudy sky. The ink almost feels tactile. You know, when you run your fingers over a page and can feel the raised print? He uses hatching in the sky and on the storks' bodies, creating these amazing tonal variations. It reminds me of other graphic artists who used black and white to give us so much: think about the emotional world that Lynd Ward created with woodcuts, or the way Art Spiegelman used simple lines in Maus to convey really complex emotions. Maybe Havrylenko was inspired by those guys, or maybe it's just that artists are always talking to each other, even across time and place. It's like we're all just trying to figure out how to make marks that mean something.