Kyiv Diary 2014

Vlada Ralko made this artwork, Kyiv Diary, with ink and graphite on paper. You can see how the ink bleeds and pools, creating these murky pools of color. I imagine Ralko sitting with her sketchbook, marking the paper with ink, almost as a form of automatic writing. Look how quickly she’s worked! She's really gone for it in a raw and immediate way. There are erasures and corrections, and the drawing feels like a site of inquiry. It’s like she is thinking through drawing, where each mark becomes a thought, a feeling, an observation. The subject matter is compelling. We see two bodies – or maybe it’s the same body – suspended in mid-air, diving into some kind of unknown, murky space. You see the way Ralko uses line to create a sense of depth and movement? The spiky, radiating lines around the figure in the first panel and the shading around the feet in the second? Artists are in an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity. In this artwork, Ralko embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations and meaning over fixed or definitive readings.