Life of a Poet: Act 2, 2026
These works comprise Part 2 of a body of acrylic paintings chronicling the life of my late uncle and poet, Oleg Arnoldovich Nadelaiev, born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine under the USSR. Rooted in themes of grief, memory and transformation, Life of a Poet navigates a complicated brotherhood with intimacy.
I completed each painting within the same day that I began it, keeping with the singular energy of a moment, exploring color as memory, emotion and story. In making these intimate, small-scale paintings, I hope to restore a layer of humanity to the individuals we inadvertently flatten into a fragment.
Like many, Oleg did not thrive under the USSR’s oppressive regime (and the cataclism of changes that followed.) With his father remaining in Kyiv and his mother moving to St. Petersburg, Russia after a divorce, Oleg chose to remain in Kyiv — the city he’d call home his whole life. Along with publishing multiple books of poetry, recording music and writing relentlessly, Oleg spent his life battling addiction and victimhood.
Life of a Poet gives Oleg another chance to be seen. A series of small-scale paintings on paper from photographs will span his childhood in the USSR through adolescence and adulthood in a changing world. Their intimate scale invites the viewer to step close, encountering him personally rather than one of many. Through telling Oleg’s story, I seek to restore complexity to a life flattened by a single narrative, finding a language that holds contradiction without erasing tenderness and honors connection without denying harm.