Female image 1975

Hryhorii Havrylenko drew this female image with ink on paper. It's got such a classic sensibility – a kind of knowingness, right? Those simple lines somehow manage to nail down an entire expression. You can tell Havrylenko had a really sensitive hand, able to get so much across with so little. I'm thinking about the way he lets the line break – like where the hair meets the shoulder. It's not a hard edge, but it suggests softness. I imagine him sitting there, maybe with a cup of tea, just letting his eye follow the model's form. It's a dance between observation and interpretation. You can see echoes of Matisse or Modigliani in the economy of the line. It feels like he's in conversation with them, figuring out how to capture something essential about the human form with a minimum of fuss. It’s all about that ongoing dialogue, figuring out how to see, how to feel, and how to make it all visible.