Kitchen garden on Obvodny channel 1921

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky made this drawing, Kitchen garden on Obvodny channel, with pen and ink. I can only imagine Dobuzhinsky hunched over his paper, a single light illuminating the scene as he captured it from his unique perspective. The image unfolds through the foreground, where a rough-hewn fence, strung with barbed wire, dominates our view. It's almost as if the artist wanted to trap us. I’m drawn to the contrast between the natural and the industrial. There is wild grass in the garden, yet these sinister factory chimneys loom in the background! Perhaps the garden is a space of small resistance. With each careful stroke, Dobuzhinsky explores the relationship between constraint and freedom, decay and growth. I wonder if he was thinking about the relationship between the natural and the industrial in the early 20th Century. Did he think that a balance could be found? This is a deeply personal work, but it speaks to universal themes of resilience, adaptation, and the human spirit's ability to find beauty in unexpected places.