Untitled (Abstract) 1937

Here’s a drawing of geometric shapes made by Ilya Bolotowsky. It’s a combination of straight and curving lines, rectangles and blobs, arranged in what seems like a carefully thought-out composition. I wonder what he was thinking when he made it. What was he looking at? What kind of music was playing in the background? Did he labor over it, or did it come easily? I like to think of the artist as a kind of medium, channeling something from another realm. The criss-crossed hatched areas make me wonder if he was trying to create volume, depth, or shadow; the relationships and the flatness create a kind of tension between illusion and reality, flatness and depth. It’s like a puzzle with multiple solutions. Painters are always in dialogue with one another, across time and space. Bolotowsky was likely thinking about the work of the Cubists, or maybe even Mondrian, but he was also doing his own thing, in his own way, and it is this individuality that shines through.