Naughty kids 1992

Oleg Holosiy made this painting, Naughty Kids, using oil on canvas at some point in his short but sweet life. You can see it's a world painted in earth tones with flashes of red—like raw umber and burnt sienna mixed with crimson. It's got that quality of emerging, like the artist was building it up layer by layer, trying to get something just right. I imagine Holosiy wrestling with this scene, maybe thinking about childhood, or some kind of half remembered dream. There's a figure tumbling upside down in the upper right corner—the thick paint there gives it this sense of gravity, or maybe weightlessness. It's like he's capturing a fleeting thought, pinning it down with these bold strokes. The material qualities, the way the paint sits on the surface, the way the colors bleed into each other, are all part of the story. And that red circle in the background reminds me of someone else’s mark making... a nod to another painter perhaps, another way of seeing. Artists like Holosiy are always in conversation, riffing off each other, building on what came before, and that’s how the evolution of painting continues.