Anatoliy (Nikitovich) Yanev, The Cosmonauts, 1980s, Oil on Canvas

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Drift, dream, and flirt with the universe — "The Cosmonauts" turns the velvet night sky into a salon of stars.

… Read more Drift, dream, and flirt with the universe — "The Cosmonauts" turns the velvet night sky into a salon of stars.

Who hasn’t, at some point, dreamed of drifting through the stars. In this painting, The Cosmonauts, we find not one, but two astronauts in their white suits, floating gracefully through the infinite, still tethered to their spaceship. Behind them, two planets gleam like jewels in a velvet-blue cosmos, a backdrop as theatrical as any Parisian salon.

Anatoliy (Nikitovich) Yanev (b. 1945) has done more than paint; he has orchestrated a cosmic ballet. The colours do not merely sit—they pirouette, bright, audacious, and entirely unrepentant, a delicious rebellion against the sober night sky. It’s Soviet space age meets haute-rustique fantasia.

In our world, this is not merely a painting—it is an invitation. To drift, to dream, to flirt with the universe!

Anatoliy (Nikitovich) Yanev treats colour like a mischievous companion, leaping from the muted hush of a winter's dawn to the blazing crescendo of a Crimean sunrise. A graduate of the Kyiv State Art Institute and a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 1988, he is widely counted among the great colourists of the Kirovograd school.

His works hang in the Kirovograd Art Museum and in private collections across Ukraine, Poland, the United States, the Czech Republic, and Germany — proof, if any were needed, that good taste travels. In 2005 he received the Kirovograd Regional Prize for Fine Arts; in 2013, the President of Ukraine bestowed upon him the title "Honored Artist of Ukraine" — formal recognition for an artist who never quite played by formal rules.

The Cosmonauts (original title «Открытый космос» / "Open Space" or "Spacewalk"), inscribed verso by the artist | Anatoliy (Nikitovich) Yanev | Oil on canvas, 110 × 125 cm | 1980s See less