Biography

Oleg Shvets was born in 1971 in Soviet Union, north-west of Kazakhstan, in the small town of Alga. Surrounded by Kazakh steppes, flat and dry, this small town in the middle of nowhere didn’t offer any opportunities for children to learn art. In 1981 Oleg’s family moved to the south of Ukraine – known as the beautiful peninsula Crimea. This is where Oleg started developing his art skills, watching and appreciating the beauty of the surrounding nature and its variety from plains to mountains, from marshes to forests, from lakes and mountain rivers to the shores of the Black Sea. Crimean nature influenced his desire to capture it first in drawings and then in watercolors and oils.
At the age of 11, he entered the children’s art studio, where he started developing as an emerging young artist. After mandatory army service Oleg returns to the Palace of Culture and starts working there as a movie poster artist/designer, and leads the same children’s art studio where he took his first steps on his road to art. 
From 1993-1996 he studied at Ivanovo College of Culture as a Theater Stage Director. He used these years to explore theater stage design. While in the college he was self-educating himself from the books and lectures offered to him by the artist students in exchange for stretching and priming canvases and making frames for their artworks. This was the time when Oleg was deeply influenced by Russian realism school of the 19^thcentury, especially landscapes of Shishkin and Levitan, and seascapes of Aivazovsky. He started developing his oil painting skills as realist for the next few years, as he continued his art self-education. 
Due to the harsh political and economic situation in Ukraine, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 2000. Now he works and creates his art in his current town of residence, Reisterstown, MD. He enjoys working in his home studio, as well as traveling to paint out events or painting simply en plein air in beautiful places he finds across the east coast. He works primarily with oil paints and watercolors, and he aspires to continuously improve and enjoy his painting journey as it evolves.