Landscape with the Trail 1975

Hryhorii Havrylenko’s ‘Landscape with the Trail’ is made up of thousands of tiny hatched pen marks, as if the artist built the composition from the ground up, slowly and meditatively. I imagine Havrylenko bent over his work for hours, each mark a breath, a thought, a tiny vibration in time. What was it like to create this landscape? Did he think about the old masters while making it, like Van Gogh who also used the same technique to depict wheat fields and skies? The marks are so small, so uniform, yet together they create a rich, complex texture. The trail itself emerges from the darkness, a winding path leading who knows where. It's not just a landscape, it’s a world, seen through the eyes of someone who really took the time to look, to feel, to translate. We painters, we're all in conversation, you know? Each of us picking up where the last one left off, adding our own little something to the mix.