Girl with a Flower 1913

Pavel Filonov made *Girl with a Flower* sometime in his career using what looks like pencil and maybe some muted washes of colour on paper. The way he’s built up this world is brick by brick, or maybe cell by cell, like he's not just painting a picture, but he's growing it. Looking closely, you can see how the surface is covered in these tiny, angular marks. It's not about smooth blending, but about accumulating these small details, almost obsessively, to build up the larger image. You see how the houses in the background aren’t just houses, they’re made of the same stuff as the figures, like everything’s connected in this weird, organic way. The girl herself, holding that little flower, seems kind of lost in thought, or maybe lost in this world Filonov’s created. It reminds me a bit of some of the visionary art that was happening around the same time, like maybe Hilma af Klint, where the artists were trying to get at some deeper, hidden reality through their art. It’s like Filonov’s saying that seeing isn’t just about looking, it’s about understanding how everything’s connected.