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" uses only black lines to create a landscape. It’s all about process here. It’s the kind of drawing where you can see the artist thinking, each mark deliberate, building up the image layer by layer. Look at how he creates depth. The foreground is dense, a thicket of crisscrossing lines that become the furrows in a field perhaps. Then, your eye travels upwards, where the lines become more open, suggesting a distant horizon, a lightness of being. It's like a visual hum, a low-frequency buzz that fills the whole image, making you feel like you're standing in that field, feeling the sun and wind. The simplicity is what makes it so powerful. It reminds me a little of Agnes Martin's grids, but with a folksy, illustrative twist. It's a good reminder that art isn't always about grand gestures, sometimes it’s about the quiet accumulation of small, thoughtful marks.