Female Image (dark) 1960

This striking image of a woman, by Hryhorii Havrylenko, is rendered in soft pastels with dark outlines. I wonder how many attempts it took him to arrive at this mysterious face, with its hints of Byzantine icons and the avant-garde. I imagine the artist in the studio, circling this face, building it line by line in a dusty haze of pigment. See how the weight of the color presses on the surface, creating a luminous effect through those velvety marks. The artist must have felt the weight of history while creating the work. Those tiny blue dots in the eyes! I find myself gazing into those small details, wanting to know more. What else did Havrylenko make? How do the shapes in this image speak to other depictions of women across art history? I can't help but feel that artists everywhere are constantly responding to each other. We all exist in a long, messy conversation where new marks are made by looking, thinking, and remembering.