Svetlana Tartakovska (1979), Young Writer, Undated, Oil on masonite.
I’m kind of obsessed with this painting and others by the same artist of Black girls. it is one of the few representations of Black women in “traditional art,” for lack of a better term that shows the subject as soft, delicate and vulnerable, which are qualities ascribed to us so rarely it’s notable when it happens. It’s painted by a Ukrainian woman. I don’t have time to unpick all the complexities there, but there’s enough fraughtness between Black women and Eastern Europeans that the source of this painting is equally as surprising to me as the tenderness of subject.
