Female image 1975

This portrait of a woman was made with colored pencils by Hryhorii Havrylenko, but when exactly we can't be sure. Look at the different colored lines of graphite hatching across the surface of the paper. It feels like he was trying to capture not just her likeness, but maybe a mood or a fleeting thought. I'm curious about the way the image emerges from the page. I'm thinking about the artist’s hand moving back and forth, filling in the planes of her face, almost like a sculptor slowly revealing a figure from a block of stone. He seems to have worked reductively, allowing some planes to dissolve back into the ground of the paper. Notice how the blue in her eyes is echoed in the shading on her face. I'm reminded of other artists, like Agnes Martin, who used simple gestures to create subtle, resonant images. It makes you think about how the simplest acts of mark-making can communicate so much.