Rural landscape. Stebliv (?) 1956

Hryhorii Havrylenko made this pen drawing of a rural landscape, probably sometime in the mid-20th century. It’s got a real sense of immediacy, like he was just trying to get the image down as quickly as possible. I love the scratchy energy of the marks, especially how he builds up the darks in the trees on the left. You can almost feel his hand moving across the page. Notice how the thin, quick lines define the shapes of the houses and suggest the rolling hills in the background, all with a kind of playful looseness. The texture is all in the ink. It’s pretty straightforward, nothing fancy, but that’s part of its charm. The drawing reminds me a little of some of Picasso's more casual sketches, not in style, but in the way it captures a scene with such minimal effort, conveying a mood without getting bogged down in details. It’s a great example of how art can be about suggestion and feeling, not just representation.