Artist Gennady Fadin studied at the art and design department of the Polytechnic College at the Leningrad Rehabilitation Center in Pavlovsk. Today, this educational institution is called the College of the Interregional Center for rehabilitation of people with hearing problems. In 1971, Fadin returned to the Polytechnic College and became a teacher. In the painting White Night, he portrayed the students of this institution, hearing-impaired artists on a riverboat tour. Fadin conveyed the special features of their communication through intent gazes and position of hands, showing that the three characters in the center of the picture speak sign language.

The young man of Asian appearance, who is standing in the foreground on the left, was also featured in another of Fadin’s works, Portrait of a Student from Mongolia. The current location of this painting is unknown.

White Night is a genre painting: on it, the artist depicted a scene from everyday life. This is a multi-figure composition including a group of three young people on the foreground and a young man with a bag in which rolled sheets of paper are visible, who is standing next to them in the aisle. A man in a cap sits behind his back, his head is half-turned. Other passengers of the tour boat are painted in less detail. However, the artist paid great attention to architectural elements: the buildings on the banks of the river are well recognizable; they are located in Saint-Petersburg on the embankments of Fontanka River.

In this work, Gennady Fadin used two main types of paints: warm ocher and brown, and cool gray and light blue shades. Their combination conveys the dim twilight, characteristic of the white nights.

After graduating from the Polytechnic college in Pavlovsk, Gennady Fadin completed his studies in the Leningrad State Art Institute named after Repin, then worked in the studio of the artist Viktor Oreshnikov.

So the artist created works in different genres: still lives, portraits, historic-themed paintings. Today, his paintings are included in museum collections in Russia, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Japan.