Above the Icebergs 1991

Oleg Holosiy made this strange little painting, "Above the Icebergs," with oil on canvas. I can only imagine him building up this nocturnal landscape, stroke by stroke. He was probably thinking about how the light of the moon bounces off the ice, how a hot air balloon might find its way into a dream. It’s almost like he was trying to paint something solid from something totally intangible. The canvas has a kind of ghostly quality. It looks like the air is thick with fog. I love how the paint is so thin it almost disappears in some places, and so thick in others that it glows. It's as though Holosiy is in conversation with all those romantic painters who tried to capture the sublime, but with a twist, making it stranger and more intimate. I think about other painters who blend reality and dream so seamlessly. Each artist’s work adds to our collective visual language.