Composition 1963

Hryhorii Havrylenko made this watercolor 'Composition' sometime during his life, and looking at it I’m thinking about quiet determination and seeing the world in shapes. I imagine him carefully laying down each stroke, watching the colors mix and bleed into each other on the paper. You can almost feel the artist searching for some kind of answer, building up the image from patches of color like putting together a puzzle, or maybe even weaving a tapestry. The hues, pale blues and greens, soft purples and yellows, create a gentle, harmonious feeling. It kind of reminds me of Klee, this way of building the image from simple chromatic areas, with gentle changes of tone, while also having the compositional eccentricity of someone like Florine Stettheimer. It's interesting to think about how artists have always been in conversation with one another across generations, riffing on each other's ideas. Painting is this embodied expression, isn't it, so we embrace the unknown, we allow for all sorts of meanings to emerge.