Biography

Self Portrait

Vladimir Sosnovsky was born in 1922 in Novaya Ushitza, Khmelnitzky Region, Ukraine. In 1928 the family moved to Odessa. As a child, showing a great love of drawing, his parents sent him to an art school for children. In 1939 he joined the Odessa Grekov Art College, but with the onset of World War II, was asked to serve at the front, after completeing only two years of these studies. On his return in 1945, he was to continue his studies under the well known artist L. Mutchnik.

In 1948 he entered the Kiev Art Institute from which he graduated in 1954. He was then to work as a deputy director at the Odessa Western and Oriental Art Museum. From 1956 he taught painting at the Odessa Theatre and Art College until his death in 1990.

Brilliant painter as he was, Sosnovsky never attempted to push his art or indeed himself. He was obsessed with painting and spent all of his free time (when not teaching) painting en plein air - he was in love with nature and painted it obsessively.

Sosnovsky never tried to be a fashionable painter. Sincerity was his main characteristic, his motto and his goal. Touched by Sosnovsky's Art, his deep lyricism and alive romanticism, a well known modern Artist said after visiting his posthumous exhibition: "I've began to doubt my own methods after seeing Sosnovsky's Realism. I admit my defeat."

In his paintings Sosnovsky created his own beautiful world - a world with no hidden meanings, as there is no meaning in the beauty of nature - a glorious sunset, a smell of a rose bush, the sound of running water or the wind blowing through the branches of a tree. Only a true master can use such simple and honest language.