Oleg Shvets was born in 1971 in the Soviet Union, northwest 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 of 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, Oleg entered the local children’s art studio, where he started developing as an emerging young artist. While growing up he had another passion for reading adventure and science fiction books, followed by drawing the main characters with pencils or watercolors on paper, and his favorite subjects were spaceships and sea adventures with tall ships and sailboats. This was the time when the young artist started falling in love with seascapes, and that feeling continued to grow through time.

After mandatory army service, Oleg returns to work at the Palace of Culture in his home village 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 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 when Oleg was deeply influenced by the Russian realism school of the 19th century, especially the landscapes of Shishkin and Levitan, and the seascapes of Aivazovsky. He started developing his oil painting skills as a realist for the next few years, as he continued his art self-education.

Due to the harsh political and economic situation in Ukraine, Oleg immigrated with his family to the United States in 2000. Now he works and creates his art in his town of residence, Reisterstown, MD. He enjoys working in his home studio, as well as traveling to paint out events or painting simply plein air in beautiful places he finds across the East Coast. In 2022 Oleg started participating in local Plein Air events around Maryland as a non-juried artist. He works primarily with oil paints and watercolors, and he aspires to continuously improve and enjoy his painting journey as it evolves.