Painting Wedding. Kiss, artist Nosan Volodymyr

Artist: Volodymyr Nosan
Title: “Wedding. Kiss!”
Year: 2020
Dimensions: 60 × 80 cm
Materials: oil on canvas, stretched on a subframe
Technique: oil painting
Original hand-painted artwork

“Wedding. Kiss!” by Volodymyr Nosan — a figurative composition dedicated to one of the most recognizable moments of a traditional wedding celebration. The artist depicts the festive ceremony as a lively scene: guests embrace, talk, raise their glasses, while several couples kiss after the traditional exclamation “Bitter!”, a wedding custom encouraging the newlyweds to kiss.

The multi-figure composition is deliberately dense. The characters fill almost the entire canvas, creating the atmosphere of a lively celebration and a sense of being present among the guests. The figures are rendered in a generalized manner, without detailed portraiture. The emphasis is placed on gesture, movement, human interaction, and the overall rhythm of the scene.

The palette combines muted gray, greenish, and earthy tones with vivid red and pink accents. Red runs throughout the composition — in the background, clothing, glasses, and smaller details — bringing the numerous figures together within a unified pictorial space. Free drawing, emphasized contours, and the visible texture of oil paint form the artist's distinctive visual language.

Volodymyr Nosan is an Honored Art Worker of Ukraine, a professional painter, graphic artist, and educator with many years of exhibition experience. His work has developed a recognizable artistic language combining painting and graphic art, decorative color, generalized forms, and expressive linear structure; art historian Olha Denysenko notes the influence of Ukrainian and Eastern printmaking, Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and the “Severe Style” in his works.

“Wedding. Kiss!” is of interest both as a decorative artwork for an interior and as an original figurative work by an established artist. Nosan's professional biography, solo and national exhibition projects, and developed individual style provide an objective context for positioning the painting within the collectible art segment.