Sitting woman 1975

Hryhorii Havrylenko made this drawing of a seated woman with what looks like a fine liner, sometime before 1984. The linear quality is so interesting! Look how he's built the form with simple, contour-like lines, but then added tone and shadow with these hatched marks. It gives the whole thing this sense of volume, but also flatness, all at once. The woman's hands, clasped in her lap, are described with such a nervous energy, like he's trying to get the lines down as fast as he can! I wonder if he was drawing from life? There's something about the speed and simplicity of the mark-making that feels very honest and unpretentious. It reminds me a little of Matisse's line drawings, or maybe even some of the early modernists who were trying to capture the essence of form with as few lines as possible. It's a good reminder that art is about process, about seeing and responding, and not necessarily about perfection.