Artist's Granddaughter 1976

Sergiy Grigoriev made this painting of his granddaughter with oil on canvas. I love how the artist has built up the form of the girl with strokes of warm color. The whole painting shimmers with a kind of inner light. Look how he's rendered the folds of her top and the gentle curve of her face, so loose and free. You can almost feel him dabbing at the canvas, building up the image through layers of feeling and memory. And that scarf, thrown casually over her shoulders, is a masterclass in color and texture. There are touches of orange, white, and black. It feels like Grigoriev is talking to us about the pleasure of seeing, but also of the hand moving, the brush loaded with paint, making marks. It is all about how a single gesture can communicate so much. Painting is an embodied experience, a way of working through ideas and emotions, with each generation inspiring the next.