Houses above the water. Stebliv (?) 1956

Hryhorii Havrylenko made this drawing, Houses above the water. Stebliv (?), with black ink. Just look at how the image emerges from the page with these short, broken lines and patches of darker ink. I imagine Havrylenko hunched over a table, rapidly capturing the world in front of him, distilling it into an essence. What was he thinking as he worked? What was his relationship to this place? I feel the artist’s excitement in the urgency of the marks, and the open spaces on the page – those breath-like pauses between strokes. The marks describing the water are so evocative – simple vertical strokes become reflections and movement. It puts me in mind of other landscape artists like Van Gogh, who also transformed what he saw into personal expression. Artists are always in dialogue with one another, you know, building on what came before and pushing toward something new!